Andrew Orlowski

An answer to the music industry’s woes slipped into the IFPI Annual Report last week, but its significance went unnoticed. Before I get to it, though, here’s a poser.

“We screw the struggling artist, and pay the suit,” Nick Carr mused recently. Carr was examining a contradiction: information has never been less free, it’s never had as much as much value attached to it. Once you add up your Sky Sub, mobile broadband bill, and the many other information services, we pay a fortune for information, most of which is entertainment. He continued:

“It’s a strange world we live in. We begrudge the folks who actually create the stuff we enjoy reading, listening to, and watching a few pennies for their labour, and yet at the very same time we casually throw hundreds of hard-earned bucks at the saps who run the stupid networks through which the stuff is delivered,” he wrote.

elsewhere and you’ll find people saying they make a point of principle not to pay for entertainment digitally, because entertainment companies are wicked. The principle is that two wrongs make a right, which makes withholding the payment justified. Maybe even morally superior to paying.

But as Nick points out, we all actually pay a fortune to suits – they’re just different suits. They’re suits at large telcos, advertising middlemen (eg, BT) and service companies. The answer seems simple.

If you’re a copyright business, then to appease the copyright militants, you must pretend that you’re not. You must say you’re in plumbing, or infrastructure. Or anything, actually. For the world’s biggest record company, Vivendi, this will be a case of returning to one’s roots. Universal’s parent Vivendi began life as Paris’s first monopoly water supplier – it only changed its name from CGE and spun off the water and sewage businesses in 2000. And look, we can mention sewage and The X Factor in the same sentence without berating the obvious.

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The Lords this week discussed new compensation for copyright holders this week – including a voluntary ‘Hail Mary fine’ payable by file sharers, instead of suspension – but nobody noticed.

It was late on Wednesday night, and the Lords were six hours into their fourth session this month discussing the Digital Economy bill. Lord Lucas moved Amendment 156, giving an infringer a choice:

[It] requires the payment of an additional fee by the subscriber for the maintenance of unrestricted internet access, which is to be remitted to a licensing body established under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Lucas said he anticipated a more progressive licensing regime, similar to the performance right on compositions, which is non-exclusive:

"No one stops a person performing, but if they do perform, they have to pay a fee… Given the fact that someone is having a technical obligation imposed on them, it seems that they might choose to pay a fee to such an agency, which would go to relevant copyright holders. Terminating, suspending or limiting someone’s internet access just does someone harm."

Read more at The Register…

Pelted from all sides by amendments, the Digital Economy Bill continues to plough its way through Parliament. This week, the Lords lined up to have their say, but since there are so many (300) Amendments, they’ll be at it again on Monday.

Of course, out of the ten subject areas, the one labelled ‘online copyright infringement’ has attracted the most attention from their Lordships. Lord Mandelson made a number of modifications acknowledging these concerns this week – including some substantial changes to the processes. It’s the procedure rather than the principle that is vexing the Lords.

Nobody – not even those who support the Bill – is entirely happy with the procedures. Yet there is no great grassroots outpouring of opposition. While 500,000 people may have paid 79p in one week to register a protest vote for the Christmas Number One single, fewer than 500 have signed up to the Open Rights Group’s “Message to Mandelson” campaign – and some of those are supportive. We spotted one ‘Go Mandy’ from a major record label staffer and another urging his Lordship to bash the ‘freetards’.

Read more at The Register

Exclusive Record label trade association the BPI wants sweeping changes to UK online copyright practice in 11th hour amendments to the Digital Britain bill.

The amendments would grant copyright holders injunctions against websites and service providers similar to the US DMCA act – but with no ’safe harbour’ provision to verify whether the claim is merited, according to documents seen by The Register.

The BPI amendments would introduce an entirely new Section 97B of the 1988 Copyright Design and Patent Act, and would be granted when an ISP had refused to take down infringing material. The Secretary of State would have the ability to review and amend the provision "by allowing the injunctive relief available to the Court to evolve and to keep pace with technology".

As it stands in draft form, the Digital Britain bill would compel rightsholders to identify and notify infringers, in a "graduated" response, ultimately ending in temporary suspension of Internet access. The revised Section 97B, if passed, would dramatically switch the burden from rights holder to publisher.

Read more at The Register…

Opening Comments for the In The City P2P Panel, Manchester, on Sunday 18 October:

Although Rik [Falkvinge]’s in front of us in flesh and blood, he wouldn’t exist – the Pirate Party wouldn’t exist – without enforcement policies being the primary goal of the music business. The programme bills this as “two sides of a debate”, but as a journalist I get incredibly suspicious when I hear there are just two sides, because usually there are two, three or four more we don’t hear about. Let’s put this into context.

The Pirate Party exists because of a political vacuum. Politicians don’t do politics anymore. Compare them to Lenin and Thatcher, for example, who had ambitious programmes of what society should look like, that cut across social, economic and personal ideas of their time. If you look at what a politician does now, it’s focus groups.

So into this political vacuum you’ll have lots of fringe, single issue groups. The Pirate Party is the first and most successful.

Now Rik specifically evoked some Enlightenment values in his presentation – [individual rights against the church and state]. But I see this as a very conservative and reactionary movement in two quite specific ways. First it’s a techno-utopian movement that’s all about replacing politics. It presents itself as a political party, but it isn’t in politics at all. Politics is about people sitting down and working something out, a consensus.

It’s also reactionary in another way.

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…Read more at The Register

Move over Fifty Quid bloke – and make way for 14p man.

Statements seen by The Register indicate that’s all the hit music service Spotify makes per user from its advertising-supported business. The difference is the middle-aged spender coveted by the movie, games and music businesses plunks down £50 per week – but Spotify earns its 14p per user per month.

The figures – which we can disclose for the first time – make for interesting reading. They confirm Spotify’s explosive growth – topping half a million registered users in the UK in May from a standing start in January.

But revenues at this stage are negligible. Advertising income was just over £82,000 last month, hence the 14p figure. We can also reveal that despite the phenomenal growth, the takeup of the tenner-a-month subscription program is small, and as a percentage of users, is falling.

Fewer than 17,000 UK users were signed up to Spotify Premium in May, an increase of 2,700 over the previous month – despite the service adding 170,000 registered members overall.

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Tens of thousands of students have signed up to pay for a legal P2P music program in US universities, set to start later this year in experimental form. It’s Choruss, the incubator hatched by Jim Griffin – a long-time advocate of licensing P2P sharing on networks.

Choruss won’t ultimately be in the retail or service business, Griffin told us in Washington DC today – but it may provide an “umbrella” for managed service companies such as Playlouder MSP, the technology partner for the suspended Virgin Unlimited music service. “We’re not in the business of distribution,” he said. Griffin was also on a panel at the biennial World Copyright Summit, organised by CISAC, the global organisation for collective rights management societies.

Griffin says this year’s phase of Choruss is designed to experiment with pricing. Different colleges will get different pricing schemes.

“The plan is to use next school year to run tests and experiments,” he said. Only after the scheme has been running will an assessment be possible – but Griffin told Summit delegates that, “We’ve had students tell us it’s worth $20 a month – to share what they want to share.”

The fact that such large numbers have volunteered to pay for a P2P service defies the conventional music industry wisdom that the only way to compete with the pirates is with free offerings. It also shows how much Choruss has evolved since it first broke the surface last April, when talk was of opting students in automatically, in return for a “coventant not to sue”.

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Read more at The Register