Record company profits aren't more important than privacy and free speech

John Naughton's Observer column last Sunday lit into the music industry, chasing the statement by the head of the British Phonographic Institute (the UK's RIAA) that "For years, ISPs have built a business on other people's music." This is part of the music industry's blustering demands for ISPs to censor and monitor the Internet to protect the record companies' business-model (because protecting a couple of multinationals is more important than the free speech and privacy of every Internet user in the world).

An analogy may help to illustrate the point. Millions of people use the telephone network for questionable, illegal or unethical purposes. But we would regard it as unthinkable to impose on phone companies a legal obligation to monitor every conversation.

Any legislation in this area has to reflect the broad public interest - which is in ensuring the widest possible internet access by facilitating competition between ISPs without shackling them with undue regulatory obligations. The government must not be allowed to cave in to the special pleading of the music business. The green paper should be subjected to intense scrutiny, and a good place to start would be the public meeting on 19 March organised by the Foundation for Information Policy Research (see tinyurl.com/2d9u4y for details).

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[#1 posted by sg , February 22, 2008 6:35 AM]

"we would regard it as unthinkable to impose on phone companies a legal obligation to monitor every conversation."

That's right! If we made the phone companies monitor calls, all those poor guys at the NSA would be out of a job...

[#2 posted by g.park , February 22, 2008 6:39 AM]

"The broad public interest." Here in the States, our legislators stopped fussing about that years ago, and we've never been happier!

[#3 posted by futwick , February 22, 2008 8:40 AM]

For years, the music industry has built a business on other people's music.

[#4 posted by Itsumishi , February 24, 2008 9:12 PM]

@ #3 Futwick

Right on.

More musicians signed to major labels come out with a debt rather than anything worth showing. So major labels might help a small percentage of artists. So what, half of these artists could make it on their own with today’s opportunities. The internet is not destroying the music industry, it's saving it.

I wonder how many excellent artists have had their music locked to a record label only to lose a lot of money and never be able to see any return from music they have written because at the time some douchebag signed them up to a crappy contract promising them fame and fortune?

[#5 posted by Takuan , February 24, 2008 9:33 PM]

Walmart is what's killing the small labels