Piracy: The music industry strikes back

By Charlotta Hedman

Last week we argued that piracy is out of control and that even some music execs are out of their depth when it comes to tackling these issues. But not everyone is sitting idly by.

In London music industry representatives and various experts met at the Westminister eForum to discuss piracy and what to do about it. Music Ally covered the event extensively and quoted PRS‘ Will Page who compared piracy to climate change.

PRS for music also revealed a paper proposing a levy on ISPs based on the amount of piracy occurring on their networks and compared the proposal to carbon-emissions trading. Page said the impact of faster broadband networks has had a polluting effect on the legal content market.

However the levy would require new legislation and according to a government spokesperson quoted in the Financial Times there are no plans to introduce laws that would back the proposal any time soon.

According to PRS’ paper (which can be found here) the industry lacks teeth. Since the launch of Napster in 1999, the only options for the industry have been control and enforcement and that clearly isn’t enough. Ben Rush of AudioLock.NET, which specializes in watermarking, agrees.

“The current situation is pretty grim with record labels and producers only able to protect their music by actually finding the links on download sites and requesting the hosting sites to take them down with the use of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act take-down procedure” says Rush.

Rush started out as a professional DJ and producer in the late 90s but quickly noticed the damage piracy was doing to many of his friends in the industry.

“Piracy has some very serious knock on effects. Firstly if producers don’t get paid for making great tracks then very quickly they will have to leave the industry and turn to another profession which will choke the diverse pool of quality music we are all so used to. Secondly it is the knock on effect whereby the record labels simply don’t have the budget to market and promote the tracks which means less money for other creative companies such as web agencies or video production companies” says Rush.

Watermarking and AudioLock.NET work by identifying every copy of a track. If a track promoted to DJs, radio pluggers and press ends up on download sites the software can identify which of the people it was sent to is responsible. According to Rush “this way the pirates can be removed quickly from the chain stopping the music leaking”.

However not everyone agrees that watermarking is the way to go. After all the technology has been around since the dark ages of 2001 and piracy is still rife. According to an article in Wired Magazine there are a lot of issues with watermarking, especially when it comes to privacy.

“Unique watermarks would allow labels to hunt down and sue alleged copyright infringers with vastly increased efficiency, even if the file was copied from their computer without their knowledge”, writes Eliot Van Buskirk for Wired.

Watermarking might work best when it’s aimed at stopping music from leaking in the first place. Which is what Ben Rush is trying to do with his software, but when a record is released to the public there is no stopping it from going online and that’s where the industry needs to come up with new strategies. Maybe trying to put pressure on ISPs will help, but  companies like BT have already contested the new legislation. And taxing ISPs is also just another way of enforcing control, wasn’t that what they were trying to get away from?