This is a wasted piece of legislation and it is doomed to fail from stage one. Let my explain my point of view;
1) The music that I download without paying is rarely available in shops. It is either while labels that are themselves a copyright breach! or in most other cases, they are pressings that have been deleted from the record company back catalogue so I couldn't buy them even if I wanted to.
2) The music that I download that does not fall into one of the two categories above, I would not pay for anyway, it is merely the fact that I do not have to pay an extortionate price that means that it represents a value that I would be interested in downloading.
3) The record industry is the driver in this bill, claiming that the are loosing £200m a year (cited by BBC panorama, broadcast 15/03/10) yet let's look at this...
Can you buy 12 vinyl records if you're a club DJ? Can you buy a CD single if you're a domestic buyer? Answer; NO! You can't because the music industry has decided that you can't. They are not making the product for you to buy in the first place.
The current selling price for CD albums is well out of kilter with previous selling prices and they do not currently represent good value for money;
In 1988 you could buy an album on vinyl and expect to pay £6.99 (production cost £2 approx. / profit margin 71% ) yet now we are expected to pay an average price of £9.99 (production cost 50p (!) / profit margin 95%). So record companies are being more greedy in their retail selling prices. Online prices are also excessive, 79p per track on itunes for an electronic download, of which the record industry receives 50p without incurring physical production costs for any type of media. That means that the average release on itunes delivers a higher revenue stream than selling a CD in the shops - and even that is over priced!
SO that's my basic rant over and done with, but there are other reasons why it will fail...
4) All it takes is a VPN or other cloaking method and there will be absolutely no way of tracking an IP address through that.
5) By the figures offered by current research, 61% of UK households use some form of illegal download system. Are you really going to cut all of them off and prosecute all of them? You will never even scratch the surface.
6) Ok, so you've figured out a bill to track those torrenting stuff, now what about those using forums and file download sites. They move so quickly that they'll never catch them all, and even the, how do you track the IP of people visiting a site that is out of your jurisdiction?
7) Lastly. I am a musician, a semi professional one at that. I have no problem with people downloading my music. In fact I offer it for free download on a number of different sites. I do not feel that those who download it are taking any money off me, they could still buy a CD version if they like it that much, and if they don't like it enough to buy a CD then they aren't going to buy one to find out what the songs sound like in the first place.
BOTTOM LINE - WHY SHOULD THE MUSIC INDUSTRY BE ENTITLED TO SUCH PROTECTION WHEN IT DOES NOT HELP ITSELF AND ALL IT TURNS OUT IS GENERIC PULP, UNWORTHY OF MY MONEY?
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