FSJ responds to U2 manager Paul McGuinness’s rant about tech firms stealing Bono’s money in typically amusing style:
Well, I’ve got an idea. Maybe U2 could just make their own Internet, with their own routers and operating system, and they could code up their own store, and build their own iPods, and keep all the money for themselves. I think I’ll call Paul McGuinness right now and suggest that.
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Brilliant.
The announcement from McGuinness has actually caused me to decide never to buy another U2 record. Seriously. They want to promote a massive invasion of privacy and a gross trampling of civil rights and put our bloody broadband bills up just so they don’t have to endure a downturn in their not-so-meagre income. Fuck ’em.
Yes, and U2 could create their own internet, iPods etc, on another planet. One I don’t live on.
It’s a sorry year for U2, what with this and Bono wanting to put the ‘funk’ in a ‘Dell
They can afford another planet.
For fuck’s sake. The government are actually going for it.
I know. It’s pathetic.
BPI statement:
BPI Chief Executive Geoff Taylor
The music business wants to partner with internet service providers to create new services that would deliver even greater value for music lovers, artists, labels and ISPs. An internet that rewards creativity, while offering music lovers unprecedented choice and value for money, is in the long term interest of all of us.
We simply want ISPs to advise customers if their account is being used to distribute music illegally, and then, if the advice is ignored, enforce their own terms and conditions about abuse of the account. But despite some agreements in principle, the ISPs refuse to do this on any meaningful scale.
For years, ISPs have built a business on other people’s music. Yet they have paid nothing to the creators of that music, and done little or nothing to address illegal downloading via their networks.
This costs the music business hundreds of millions of pounds a year and will have serious consequences for investment in British culture in the long-term if it is allowed to continue.
We support new ways of selling music legally online. But these services are being stifled by a culture of something for nothing from which big telecoms corporations continue to profit at the expense of the music community.
For well over a year, the BPI has been trying to encourage ISPs to introduce reasonable measures that could remove the need to bring legal action against the 6-million British broadband customers that regularly use peer-to-peer networks to download music unlawfully.
This is the number one issue for the creative industries in the digital age, and the government’s willingness to tackle it should be applauded. Now is not the time for ISPs to hide behind bogus privacy arguments, or claim the problem is too complicated or difficult to tackle. It is time they started showing some corporate responsibility and partner with us to allow our digital creative economy to grow.
That six million figure seems awfully high. More than one third of all broadband users regularly download illegal music? This time last year 10% of the population regularly used P2P – and that’s IFPI figures.If illegal downloading of music has tripled, it doesn’t say much for the industry’s legal alternatives.
I like the indignation over ISPs not moving Heaven & Earth to enforce their terms & conditions. If we’re going to get all upset about the honouring of contracts, Mr BPI, I think there might be one or two musicians wanting a word.
Like you said in your email, where’s the state bailout for pornographers?
> Now is not the time for ISPs to hide behind bogus privacy arguments
What the hell? They could reasonably (wrongly, in my opinion, but reasonably) take the line that ISP’s customers should have no expectation of privacy from their ISP, or that the need to catch criminals outweighs the privacy arguments, but simply to call the privacy issue “bogus”? What utter, utter cunts.
If I were a tabloid editor, I would now order phone taps on the heads of all record company execs. They’re bound to be up to all sorts of naughty things that would make good copy. And it’s not as if they could object.
Sorry, pedantic note:
“or that the need to catch criminals”
Downloading’s a civil offence, not a criminal one. Uploading is too unless it’s for hire or sale, or unless it’s done to a huge extent. Being the first person to upload a leaked album might fall under that (and given that most leaks are from the industry or its periphery, don’t require the ISP situation to change – just scan your own networks, Mr Music Biz!), but being one of 227 bittorrent seeders shouldn’t.
Yes, that is one side of the reasonable argument that they have not engaged in, not even on the wrong side.