Wednesday 2 September 2009

rather intelligent article by Peter Mandelson about suspending the internet connections of filesharers

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6814187.ece

1 comment:

AHH said...

Totally misses the point Joe, the consumer has already decided how they want to access film, tv & music and it's not at the convenience of advertisers or tv schedulers or record company release dates - it's when they want it or not at all. They also don't want to pay multiple subscriptions for different catalogues of content. That is the no-brainer that Mandelson 'doesn't get'.

Until services are affordable and tailored for the consumer you can't expect behavior to change and you certainly can't criminalise the majority of a population that provide the only legitimacy for the law and the decisions of government in the first place.

Why would someone pay to access content in a less convenient way than is available (and always will be available provided we live in a free society god willing) elsewhere?

I simply won't watch Heroes or Gossip Girl if I have to wait a week between every episode and I don't want to wait 'til the series ends on UK TV, six months after being aired in the US, before I watch the lot on DVD. I don't want to spend £30 plus a babysitter to watch a hollywood movie in a cinema in Streatham where people talk through the movie on their mobile phones when i've got a perfectly good setup at home. I don't need an annual sports tv subscription to watch the few televised matches my team plays. I would pay for the bespoke services if they existed but they don't.

I'd also happily pay £10 a month for unlimited access to content, Spotify style, but it has to be unlimited and it has to include all content, not just music. A compulsory £120/year online content license for all internet households would cover that and then you could just let the consumer get on with things. You could even afford to pay ISPs for the necessary file-level data you'd need to distribute the income fairly to artists, writers, directors, producers... there might even be some for record companies and movie studios if they still add value somewhere.

The article shows no balance in terms of any new settlement needed for artists/content creators in return for the proposed sanctions against consumers - all in favour of established big businesses/content owners with out-dated business models. Mandelson is just parroting the line fed to him by Grange, Geffen, Murdoch or other multi-millionaire corporate lobbyist. Not what you'd expect from a 'party of the people' - just another reason why this government will be slung from power at local as well as national level - Japanese style - in the coming months.