I watched BBC parliament for over 5 hours yesterday with the digital economy bill being debated, I wasn’t 100% sure of the process or how the house of commons works (there seems to be a LOT of repetition and thanking him honourable friend which slowed the whole process down to a crawl.
I’ll be honest, the cutting people off the internet part of the bill isn’t what I’m against, we already cut hackers and paedophiles off of the internet and the bill allows for a lot of warning, letters won’t work and we all know it, it may be harsh but so is a £50,000 fine per file.
What I am against is the fact that the MP’s are taking the BPI and other organisation’s statistics of job and money losses (but wait a minute) as gospel, they are denying any other data – such as the people who download buy more. We are just leaving the worst economic crisis in recent memory, thousands of jobs were lost not just in the creative industry.
While we are on the subject, at what point does an industry become creative? would a website or a piece of software be considered creative?
My biggest annoyance is, its a bill that will leave the status quo and mean that the movie and record industry won’t evolve, as they have to. They must realise that the old profit models won’t work online and change the way they charge.
Yesterday one of the MP’s mentioned that a legal download solution would not work unless there was the legal backing behind it and thats complete crap, iTunes, Spotify, Lovefilm streaming, Hulu, iPlayer, 4od, Voddler are all ways of getting music and film online, legally and have been proven to work, Hulu is an advertising based system and has just made a profit, okay not as much as the industry would like to make but these models need to be given time and testing.
I don’t download music, I use Spotify (premium) and iTunes, I don’t download films, I do go to the cinema and have a lot of DVD’s (but that experience really needs to sort it’s self out for the price it charges) but I do download TV Shows, My reasoning for this is that a) I will generally buy the DVD’s when they are available.
In the connected world we live in, with twitter, blogs, news aggregation and the rest, it’s just not possible to keep a storyline or buzz secret when shows are not simulacast across the world, when half of my friends have seen the latest episode of Castle and are tweeting about how amazing the story is and legally I’m only supposed to have seen the first two episodes, something’s gotta give. The current choices are, get a VPN to the states and view hulu via a proxy, download the full high def show less than an hour after it has aired in the USA or wait OVER A YEAR before a UK network picks it up and then we may finally get the DVD’s.
We carn’t even import DVD’s because the film industry wanted regional locking, so to import the disk’s I’d have to break that and even THAT lends me in fuzzy water.
DVD’s are another issue, especially in the UK, where shows have a habit of splitting up dvd’s into 3 episode chunks and selling them for £15, (doctor who and lost come to mind) if a series is 12 episodes that means you’ve paid £60 for the set AND then they release the full set with special features.
The release cycle seems to be, DVD Release (2 months) Special edition DVD (2 months) 2 Disk DVD with video extras and cast interviews (a year) super ultra edition dvd with a free limited edition mug….then the sequel.
The problem with online distribution is it makes it very hard to do that.
I just want to leave with a final note, 20,000 people called there MP’s over the past week or so and about 40 MP’s turned up to debate last night, the phone calls were dismissed as ‘ by nerds ‘ and ‘outnumbered by the creatives’ I don’t care if your for the Digital Economy Bill or not as an MP if you received phone calls saying that your constituents have an opinion, at least turn up to the debate, I was quite angry last night, heck so angry I was considering running for an MP myself and noone wants that.
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Dom, if you run for MP I’ll move to Leeds just to vote for you!!!
Another 3 points that really bother me.
1) If I’m downloading pirated software and then I’m cut off .. what’s to stop me popping into Carphone Warehouse and picking up a PAYG Broadband Dongle?
So it’s not going to work.
2) I work in the creative industries. I’m a designer. Don’t pretend this is about the “creative industries” vs. pirates
3) What ever happened to Magna Carta?
If someone’s been committing a crime, take them to court.
Actually, paedophiles are not cut off from the internet. Every time the police have tried to do this, judges have ruled it to be a disproportionate response. Why? Because the paedophiles have families, and those innocent people should not be disconnected from the internet because of what someone else in their house did.
In that way, and only that way – child abuse is a criminal offence and unlawful downloading is not – can an analogy be drawn between the issue of online child abuse and the issue of unlawful file-sharing.