Geoff Taylor, BPIThe attacks by hackers on the FBI, Department of Justice and creative industry and the recent protest by tech companies against new anti-piracy laws have exposed the dirty underbelly of the internet piracy economy.
Anonymous accuse governments and the creative community of being "tyrants" for trying to prevent them stealing other people's work. This illustrates the extremism of much of the anti-copyright movement.
Not only is it morally wrong to justify taking someone else's work for nothing, it ignores the simple truth that anything of value, including entertainment, takes time and money to create. One would hope that such naive views would carry little public influence. But they have some very powerful allies.
Under the guise of fighting for their vision of an "open internet", some Silicon Valley behemoths have launched a high-profile campaign to oppose new US laws to tackle major pirate websites. As publicity stunts for this campaign, Wikipedia closed for a day and Google "censored" its doodle, asking their users to oppose the legislation.
These large corporations argue that blocking access to some mass piracy sites amounts to Chinese-style censorship of free speech and will "break the internet" - ignoring that other types of illegal sites are routinely blocked, and people will always be free to express their points of view through the millions of perfectly legal websites that don't infringe copyright.
But is the tech community's opposition to tackling piracy motivated by principle - or by profit?
Many consumers see digital theft as a kind of victimless crime - musicians and film stars have loads of money, right?
In fact, most musicians earn less than the national average income and everyone who works in the creative sector, from roadies to mastering engineers, is negatively affected by piracy. But the money that downloaders save by taking music, films and books for nothing is flowing silently into the pockets of large tech corporations.
Online hosting services pay users to upload the most popular files and charge freeloaders for faster downloads.
Search giants earn billions from online advertising, with searches for illegal free music and films a major driver of traffic.
Broadband providers charge users for all the extra bandwidth they consume downloading stuff for free.
The internet advertising industry earns commission from the ads on pirate sites, and brands reach a huge audience cheaply.
This is the hidden internet piracy economy.
Most of the internet companies that benefit from this routinely claim that they don't support piracy. They may well be sincere. Yet they consistently oppose every new measure to tackle it, and offer up no effective alternatives of their own.
Long term, this cannot be the way forward.
Apple's former chief executive, the late Steve Jobs, understood that the creative and technology industries should be partners, and that consumers benefit from better quality services as a result. Spotify and others have taken up the mantle and there are new examples to welcome, with Google and some ISPs launching their own digital music services.
But if we want a digital economy that works, the big players on the internet need to kick their addiction to the money flowing from piracy. Like Steve Jobs, they need to show that they value other people's creativity as well as their own.
Geoff Taylor is chief executive of the BPI - the trade body that represents the British recording industry.
― Armand Schaubroeck Ratfucker, Friday, 20 January 2012 22:26 (fourteen years ago)