Why “Three Strikes and You’re Out” won’t work.
Tuesday, April 7th, 2009On The Guardian Music Blog, U2′s manager Paul McGuinness praises France’s proposed “3 strikes and you’re out” laws on internet piracy.
Amidst the posts sneering at U2 (Guardian blog commenters absolutely hate U2 with a passion I can never quite understand), commenter Iainl sums up precisely why this proposed law is dangerously flawed.
I don’t pirate music. And I’m certainly not depriving you of any funds. But I still don’t want to be kicked off the internet just because some kid has randomly used my address as the spoof field when hiding their tracks - something that is already so common in email as to be totally unworkable.
That just about knocks the nail on the head. With their past record of Mafia-like behaviour, I don’t even trust the media cartels to be able to distinguish between use of legitimate streaming sites like Spotify or Last.fm and illegal downloaders. And who’s to say the next time somebody in the record industry gets into a dispute with a legal file-streaming site over the level of royalty payments that they won’t respond by using this law to threaten that site’s users with disconnection? Vague promises from record companies that they won’t do things like that are worthless. Once such a law is on the statute books, somebody sufficiently nasty-minded or greedy will try to abuse it in that sort of way.
Even though I wish every major record company to go to the wall, I’m all in favour of creative types earning a fair reward for their efforts. But I don’t trust the existing media cartels to do it for them. With their own long track record of ripping off their creative talent they don’t exactly have any moral high ground on which to stand.
And surely the big record companies are largely responsible for letting the download culture “music should be free” genie out the bottle in the first place, by spending too much effort trying in vain to prop up an obselete business model rather than attempting to devise a new one.
To give one example, one of the biggest drivers of illegal file-sharing sites has been the fact that the legal downloading sites wasted years crippling their products with DRM, which was something the marketplace clearly didn’t want. If you were foolish enough to hand over money for a DRM-crippled download, you merely rented the music for a random amount of time. Sooner or later you’d upgrade you media player, or the company you ‘bought’ the download from will decide to shut down the DRM authentication server, and your file will no longer play. You were simply better off pirating it from a file-sharing site.
By the time they realised that DRM was a crock and started selling the DRM-free downloads the marketplace wanted in the first place, illegal file-sharing was too well established. It’s now far harder for legitimate substription-based downloading sites to get going than it would have been had the cartels not tried in vain to strangle downloading at birth.
