UK File-sharing debate
The music file-sharing debate in the United Kingdom has been raging for some months, but the issue has barely rated a mention in our little corner of the world. What are some of the ramifications of the European debates over online file-sharing, and how will they affect us in Australia?
If you haven’t heard a lot about this issue, it’s not a real surprise; the (sometimes heated) discussions over the place of peer-to-peer online sharing of music files haven’t been widely covered by Australian press, most likely due to the fact that the real discussions have, by and large, been centred around semantic nuances of British civil law. Most of the coverage was related to Lily Allen’s mostly incoherent Twitter and blog ramblings on the question of file-sharing, rather than the actual issue itself. The debate has barely raised a ripple in the Australian media.
"Fair enough," you might say. "We probably aren’t as bad as the UK with illegal music downloads; that’s why we haven’t heard much about it, because it isn’t relevant to us."
Wrong.
However, the monitoring of downloading and the actual punishment is to be administered by internet providers, with costs associated with administration and loss of business being estimated at £420 million (around a billion Aussie dollars) per year.
According to Music Industry Piracy Investigations, around 3 million Australians illegally download music every year. With recent government statistics showing only around 12 million Australians regularly accessing the internet, this means that one in four internet users in Australia have illegally downloaded music in the past year. A recent Nielsen poll showed almost 1,100,000 visits to BitTorrent sites by Australians last year, a 34% increase from 2007; this does not include use of music sharing applications such as Limewire. Physical music sales plunged to below $400million in 2008, down 40% from $640 million in 2003.
So it’s a big deal, really.
The debate in the UK was stirred up after the British government announced it would be taking steps to curb illegal downloads of music and other copyright content.
According to Mandelson, "The days of consequence-free widespread online infringement are over."
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So how does this affect us here in Australia? Well, apart from the fact that our judicial system lacks any real imagination and historically just applies precedent established by any overseas jurisdiction, other media organisations – namely the television and film industries – have begun to recognise how the ramifications of music file-sharing may affect their own profits. At its core, this debate is not about music sharing; it is about illegal distribution of copyright material. With movies and TV shows increasingly available online, these media forms will surely join with music heavyweights to put pressure on the Australian government to match the measures set out by the UK.
I, for one, have no problem with these laws. I will confess that I download music, mainly just because its easy and its free. If I get caught, I’m not going to complain, because it’s no-one’s fault but mine. However, if all music suddenly disappeared from the internet tomorrow, I probably wouldn’t care, because there are OTHER ways of getting this music; and that’s the whole point. There inevitably will be – and have been – denoucements of the laws as an invasion of privacy, Orwellian measures to monitor internet usage, but there is a simple solution; make a bit of an effort, and actually BUY music.
Go to a show and buy a CD. Go to a shop and buy the music. Illegally downloading content online is no different to selling or buying pirated copies of CD’s or movies – the simple fact that it is over the internet, should make no difference to the matter. Bands and record labels still miss out on money they would have made from sales, and the fact that the content is digital rather than physical, should not really enter into the equation.
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