Thank you for the music

For over two years now we have been able to download music online - and by music I of course mean music that you have rights to, music that you own, music with no Digital Rights Management (DRM). In fact the trickle of real music download sites became a flood when Amazon stepped in, and this year even iTunes decided to let you buy music online.

This is great news. DRM technology was the result of small-minded pernicious thinking, and I am glad to see the back of it.

I'm not sure where we got the view that technology should replace social responsibility, we don't seem to be keen to do this elsewhere in our lives (if we did our cars would all have speed limiters and we'd all be wearing electronic tags), but hopefully now that the media companies have grown out of this view we can start to have a sensible conversation about piracy, funding models and the criminality of file-sharing.

(don't worry, it didn't and it isn't)

Perhaps the first step is to move the conversation about piracy into reality. The image above is from the 1984 campaign to save the music industry from home taping. Twenty-five years later the music industry seems in rude health, and you might think they would be sheepish about their tendency for exaggeration. Sadly, while the technology has changed, the overstatement lives on.

Hats of to the Guardian newspaper for challenging the figures and for looking at the real evidence about how we spend our disposable cash. To summarise: if you unpick the industry figures they assume that every download is a lost sale, and that each lost sale is worth £25 (if you follow these figures through that would mean that each UK citizen would spend a third of their salaries on music and movies were it not for piracy - this is clearly a fallacy). In fact the Guardian points out that the amount of money spent on media items over the last ten years has actually risen (its almost doubled to £8bn!) but that music as a proportion has fallen (the increase is in DVDs and Games).

So if piracy isnt the problem that the industry makes out then what are we to make of file-sharing and of file sharers? In his latest podcast Steven Fry made an impassioned call at the iTunes festival for a change in the way that file-sharing is viewed, and called on the industry (he is the first to point out that it is his industry) to stop prosecuting and criminalising ordinary people.

He makes a number of interesting points, top of which is that piracy is not the same as theft (they are demonstrably different processes, whatever the ad-men say), and that casual file-sharing should not be criminalised as piracy, but as a natural part of human behaviour that self-regulates across different social and financial circumstances, ultimately harming no-one. Although it's far from proven, the sales figures we have already mentioned seem to support this hypothesis - that in general people buy what they can afford and act within a sensible moral framework.

This does not mean that the industry should not be looking at alternative funding models. Spotify is probably ahead of its time (let's see how their mobile apps pan out), but advertising and subscription is certainly one approach. There is also money to be made from live performance, and the sale of rights to other media that has a more secure funding basis (such as pre-pay TV or movie ticket sales).

The music industry is not a sacred cow, it has no right to make money hand over fist, and while I respect the rights of musicians, singers, producers and writers to make a living and have their work protected from abuse, this does not mean that things should not change. Simple economics dictate that if music/media is more available then it will also be perceived as less valuable.

As long as it's still viable, I'm not sure why the rest of us should care.

Thanks to the unique way the BBC is funded...

Over the last few weeks the BBC have been running what at first seems a trailer for Panorama. In the trailer a camera pans over dimly lit streets of circuitry, diodes flicker like broken lamps, and sink estates wallow in the shadows of tall capacitors. "Your town; your street; your home..." the narrator threatens, "its all in our database."



The viewer raises an eyebrow, expecting some shocking revelation about Orwellian government schemes to combat terrorism, or ineptitude over social service data - in short, expecting the pitch for a documentary about sinister forces working to subvert our liberties - but then the punchline comes: "new technology means that its easy to pay your TV license, and impossible to hide it you don't. Its all in the database."

WHAT? Did I just catch that right? This isn't a documentary trailer warning us about sinister government forces, these ARE sinister government forces. The UK government, in the form of the TV licensing people, have just threatened me, told me that 'they are watching', and implied terrible consequences if I don't pay my license. Perhaps a swift trip on American Air with internment at the end of it?

Online an international audience has expressed horror and disgust, not only at the veiled threats, but also at the whole notion of paying a TV license.

Now I'm a middle-class lefty liberal, so its a foregone conclusion that I'd love the BBC, but it also means that I have a natural dislike for the government fiddling around with my rights, and it seems to me that we have reached an awkward impasse with the TV license fee in the UK.

On the one hand I completely support publicly funded broadcasting, especially when the system produces such fine quality stuff, for so many different interest groups, and on such a varied medium. There is no doubt that the BBC delivers.

On the other hand the shear breadth of that delivery makes a bit of a mockery of the TV license. You need a license (one per household) if you own equipment capable of receiving a TV signal. Even twenty years ago this made a lot of sense, but now you can listen to BBC radio, BBC DAB stations, read BBC content online, and even download programmes - all without owning equipment capable of receiving a TV signal. You can also spend all your time watching commercial channels, delivered through a cable, or by commercial satellites, without ever seeing any BBC content, but still be liable for the fee. Or you can watch that content (with adverts) on one of the many channels that buy programmes from the BBC (examples include UK Gold, Dave, and even BBC America which is independently funded).


And then there's the elephant in the room - the fact that TV advertising is slowly failing, because of digital piracy, digital recorders (press "skip" to jump the advert break) and the shear proliferation of alternative media streams. In this rapidly changing area, a license fee looks like the one iron-clad method of TV funding that can weather the storm, its basically paying for content up-front, which removes all those worries about making money with it afterwards!

All of which makes me think that fiddling with the license fee may be a good way of cutting off our own nose to spite our face.

Less of the threatening 1984 adverts though please Auntie - somebody at ITV might spot the elephant and panic :-/

You will soon be able to download music online!

Yes, folks - hidden away in the depths of the BBC technology pages is the revelation that at last, after years of false starts and obfuscation, you will finally be able to legally download music online.

Of course, many people falsely believe that they can already download music. They are sadly mistaken. The current set of online stores allow you to purchase a limited legal right to listen to music on very restricted terms - this is not ownership in any sense that the word has been traditionally applied (even to copyrighted materials).

I am not condoning downloading communism - I fully appreciate the need to respect an artist's rights to their own work, however I am against DRM whose implications are hidden from those that are purchasing the protected content. There are now millions of people who believe that they have extensive digital music archives, and while they only use their iPods they are none the wiser.

If you buy a CD you are purchasing both an optical disk and the legal right to play and use the music on that disk in a wide variety of ways. If you purchase a music file from a store such as iTunes, you are purchasing only a set of rights, and ones which are not as extensive as those you enjoy with the music on a CD. In particular you lose the right to store the music on other formats, and to store unlimited multiple copies for personal use. This has serious long term consequences for your music collection (and negates one of the main advantages of having a digital copy in the first place).

Now at last a real company (and not some dodgy outfit) is planning to extend its customers the same wide set of rights with music purchased online. This is major news, one of the most important technology stories I have read this year and it's amazing that it's tucked away on the BBC back-pages. The record companies may be beginning to trust their customers again - and this particular customer is very much looking forward to making his first online music purchase, some twelve years after the technology actually made it possible.