So, it had to be done really. Having been super organised and managed to get son to bed, food in me, and exercise complete last night I found myself with time to watch Panorama. I really didn’t want to. I knew it would annoy me. Believe me, had it clashed with Glee, I would have jumped channel faster than JISC staff run in to the kitchen at the word ‘cake’.
The Digital Economy Bill is obviously getting a lot of attention, and a lot of criticism. I’m less interested in the rights and the wrongs of the government putting in place legislation to protect multi-million pound industries. What interests me is the pointlessness and the waste of money in putting in place legislation that the internet-savvy will gracefully step around.
It was the quiet, well-informed and unremarkable segment from Dr Richard Clayton from the University of Cambridge that for me was the crux of this programme. The legislation depends on rights holders and subsequently ISPs being able to identify that a breach came from a specific IP address, or IP range. It is ridiculously easy to mask, hide, confuse, change or disguise your IP address right now. I was very amused to see that traffic on Proxify had caused it to switch over to subscriber only mode straight after Panorama. Even if it wasn’t, the people who are interested in file sharing will quickly ensure this type of annonymity is as easy a clicking a box.
I often have ‘discussions’ with people about ensuring that technology can actually deliver the legal framework that is being built around electronic resources – normally in a licensing context. However, as different groups try different approaches to ‘control’ the wild wild web, we will see this disjuncture between legal limitations and technical possibilities come up more and more.
As I said, I don’t want to get in to the right and wrong arguments about copyright on an access management blog, but a couple of observations to throw in to the pot.
- Record companies seem to assume that every illegal download equates to a lost sale. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that illegal downloads can lead to sales, and the converse – if the illegal file was not there it does not necessarily mean the user would turn to a paid for resource.
- Panorama cited figures that clearly showed that illegal downloaders spend more money per year than those who always pay for downloads. I’m no marketing expert, but disenfranchising your most lucrative customer base seems a little odd to me…
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March 17, 2010 at 5:30 pm
Rod Widdowson
“But something has to be done” screams the tabloid media (who’s ownership is often not without an axe to grind) and so something is done. Never matter that its the emperor’s new clothes. People will not stop to listen to the arguments.
It seems to me that we see this in pretty much every arena of the legislature. The fact that a new law is pointless (or worse still a further erosion of our fundamental rights) or that new plan has no value is irrelevant; the politician or the bureaucrat can point out that “something was done” and move on, while the rest of the world carries the cost. Think of airport screening.
On the specific issue of the records companies blindness, this is standard when technology catches up with a company with a hugely profitable revenue stream. These companies are frightened of anything which affects this cash cow and so will not invest in the future (I have heard the phrase phrase “eating your own babies” used to describe investing in something which may affect your cash cow – that gives an idea of how well the it goes down), rather they will invest in protecting that revenue stream.
The whole tech (and non tech) space is littered with such casualties. The record industry is interesting in that it has significant political clout and probably has more control of the media than we’d like.