It’s a bad week for anarchy, civil liberties and just generally keeping it real. Malcolm McLaren died yesterday - now he was no Joe Strummer, but it's still part of the passing of a generation that protested and shook up the establishment. This morning, the Digital Economy Bill has passed, bar the shouting. And I think when people realise what they have given away in this bill, they’ll wish there’d been more protest against it.
In better times, decent musicians would have kicked off about this. Guilty till proven innocent, summary disconnection, government control… where are The Clash when you need them? But no, instead we’ve got Lilly Allen, who just really wants Peter Mandelson to clamp down. Artists like Allen, and the record companies, don’t seem to have realised that people who download music illegally are the people most likely to pay for music too. I actually don’t download music illegally – iTunes is just too convenient. I used to, obviously, until one part of the music industry evolved to keep up with technology and stop me doing that.
I’ve also never ‘illegally’ downloaded a TV show or film. To be honest, I feel a bit not down with the kids admitting that, but it’s true. But even supposing that downloading is losing the economy billions of pounds - rather than something which ultimately encourages people to go out and buy boxsets, music, see bands etc- I don’t see how this bill is the right answer. This bill will disconnect people’s internet if their usage is high, on the assumption that it must be illegal. The Magna Carta, anyone? You’d think this government would have learned from the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes that “guilty till proven innocent” isn’t a great basis for proceeding.
And what limit on usage is going to be set? Say it’s 30 gigabytes a month. You can get loads of illegal songs and movies for that. On the other hand, if you run a business from home, you’ll be way over your limit all the time. You actually can’t set a limit; it’s a completely unworkable law. But passing it makes the government look to the powerful lobbyists in the record and movie industries like they’re doing something. And of course it puts the onus on the people and the ISPs to prove their innocence – and makes us pay for it while we’re at it.
Basically the situation we’ve got here is that record company bosses like David Geffen are dictating government policy to fit in with their 20th century business models, when the way the world works has moved on. And instead of creating new technology to adapt to this new way people want to own content, they’re forcing the Internet Service Providers to do the job of the police. Maybe we should give them guns and sniffer dogs too, or let them beat people up if they can’t prove what they’ve been doing online, or don’t know enough to stop their wi-fi being jacked.
Actual artists and musicians don’t benefit from the record industry’s way of doing business. They benefit from the egalitarian, information sharing way the internet works. They never got much money from record companies selling their albums. They might do if the technology were to exist for them to sell it themselves online. The record and Hollywood movie industries are not some kind of ’12 Good Men’, sticking up for what’s right and fair. The situation we’ve got now is more like some kind of French film noir, where the little guy just keeps getting twatted.
And that will include you, if your usage goes over this whatever arbitrary limit they set. The Digital Economy Bill is a very, very bad law, that has been barely discussed (by people who don’t know what they’re talking about anyway) and then rushed through. Keep lobbying your MP about it. So far, the Lib Dems are the only ones who have taken a stand against it – everyone else barely seems to understand it.
So in the spirit of punk, here's the mish-mash version wot Liam did of our protest song, against All This Sort of Thing...
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