An intelligent, brutal analysis of the current consultation on UK filesharing from Mo over at tumbled logic (see “UK file sharers to be cut off -justification”.
The points made in the piece convince me that officials leading on the legislative programme of Digital Britain should provide ministers far more detailed information before they decide how to proceed.
There are a number of questions that I think ministers should want to see answered by an objective, accurate study, ie not interest groups like the British Phonographic Industry. The list is by no means exhaustive. If you do have any other ideas, please just let me know:
1. What will the plan,as proposed, do to earn more money than it will cost to implement?
2. How does anything suggested make it easier for new and innovative platforms set up online legally?
3. Why can’t it be as easy to license an internet service as it is to license a radio station?
4. How big a problem is P2P, and if we got rid of it would there be any extra money earned, or would all the activity find different outlets, as they have done to date?
Those points from the tumbled logic blog:
* Nobody actually knows how much illicit file-sharing goes on
* The “7 million people” who apparently illegally download content, a figure used by the media industries to estimate resulting losses, has been thoroughly debunked and is almost completely a work of fiction.
* Nobody knows how much money is lost by rights-holders as a result of illicit file-sharing
* Nobody knows how much money is made by rights-holders as a result of illicit file-sharing
* Independent studies have consistently found that those who admit to illicit file-sharing spend more on legally-purchased content than those who don’t
* Setting aside the moral imperatives, illicit file-sharing simply cannot itself cost rights-holders money: this only occurs where people download infringing content in preference to buying it
* Anecdotal evidence suggests that plenty of people do, indeed, download content for free via BitTorrent and other sources that they would otherwise buy
* Anecdotal evidence also suggests that plenty of people also download content which they either then effectively throw away (i.e., they sample it), or go on to purchase it
* A certain proportion of illicit file-sharing is made up of people downloading content that they have free and easy access to anyway (i.e., TV programmes broadcast free-to-air in their country), and also content which they have no way of getting legitimate access to.
6 comments ↓
Why can’t it be as easy to license an internet service
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Why should any intenet service be licensed? Oh I get it. You need yet another tax to pay for Labour’s profigate spending.
You can’t get P2P back in the Box. The next step is P2P catalogues. That means you can’t shut down the equivalents of Piratebay.
On top of that will be encryption, and you can’t tell who is swapping what.
The end result is that to prove a case against someone, you have to catch them in the act of putting up a file to share. Well, even Stalin didn’t get those sorts of powers. It’s game over as far as regulation of P2P.
Look at what has happened. Internet is basically unregulated. Certainly there are paedophiles using it. However, more have been caught since the internet has been around.
Don’t regulate it. It’s none of your business.
Nick
Absolutely agree. The tumbled logic points are all good ones too.
This whole thing is impossible to implement anyway. The key question for me is, if enacted, how do they determine the individual in question? With millions of people using shared wireless connections (many unsecured), BTOpenzone hotspots etc I don’t see how it can be determined beyond doubt. If they’re going to cut off people from the internet willy-nilly then identity of the illegal sharer needs to be confirmed for definite – and I don’t think it can be.
Your questions are essentially asking for a bit of evidence-based policy-making on the filesharing issue itself. Definitely a good thing, but I think the issues go a little wider – eg with the original French HADOPI law, where’s the judicial scrutiny? – so here are a couple of additional suggestions.
What other internet based services will be denied to households whose internet access has been cut off? Are there government services whose provision is made easier, cheaper or even possible by citizens having internet access that would be denied to such households?
Is it justifiable to deny internet access to the household, when only one member of the household may have been filesharing?
common sense has to prevail on this one… otherwise either gov goes ahead and opens a whole can of worms, or goes into protracted, expensive consultations and reports. The answer is that they cannot stop pirates, no matter what they try to do. They must address the root of the problem, which is the engorged and bloated media industry which has ripped off the artists and the kids for far too long. Time to move with the times and stop trying to hold back progress. Listen to the people, and not the fatcats. The people may help you win an election instead of financing spin and losing one.
@cyberdoyle:
I don’t think you’ll ever stop -all- pirates, so long as it’s technically difficult to do, but I do think you can stop many of them without resorting to overarching heavy-handedness. The key is to examine the motivation: if it’s pure freeloading, then your options are limited, but there’s plenty to indicate that it’s by no means limited to that at all.
As a wise man remarked to me just last week, the age of artificial boundaries in product availability is coming to an end. Make a product universally and conveniently obtainable, with as few strings as are reasonably possible, without charging outrageous prices, and people will tend towards it because it’s less hassle than the alternatives. Once you start throwing DRM, huge price disparity and regional restrictions into the melting pot, it all goes horribly wrong.
It’s by no means universal, nor terminal, but there are a lot of people who have—as of right now—given up waiting for the major players in the content industries to get their act together. While Spotify is held up as a shining example of “innovation”, in technical terms it could have been implemented any time in the last decade: the hard part was the licensing, and the slowly increasing catalogue as labels realise that it’s better if they do get on board than if they don’t is testament to the fact that there’s still a long way to go. Over in TV-land, scan through past posts on the BBC Blogs, and you’ll find a whole host of mentions of difficulties in negotiating with rights-holders over BBC HD and iPlayer distribution of programmes.
This is what needs to change, and it’s something that Tom raises above—and Lord Mandelson brought up in his piece in the Times: imposing sanctions does absolutely nothing to bring about this change, and indeed it actively discourages it by creating artificial frameworks to maintain the status quo.
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