indigetesdii.org :: blog

… mirrors of purest virtue and truth, or like whores to use as one pleases, as Theodor Billroth said. The latter definitely applies to the vomit spewed forth by the music industry claiming they lose ever so much well-deserved cash because of all those evil, Satan-worshipping “pirates”.

In May 2009, “illegal downloads” were blamed for billions in losses and thousands of jobs lost; at the same time ‘government advisers’ claimed that Britain’s population consisted of seven million copyright terrorists™ who are obviously personally responsible for the detriment of many, now unemployed, music industry workers and their families.

The dubious statistics reached the government through Ciber, which got them from Forrester Research, which got them from one of their subsidiaries’ research – and was commissioned by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI).

The BBC radio show More Or Less uncovered the above facts and found that the statistics were based on some rather questionable assumptions (mirror).

As it turns out, the music industry’s and (scarily enough) the government’s “facts” were based on the survey confessions of 136 people – surely they are a good representation of a population of 61 million (when is 0.000223% not good enough?).

Of course, 0.000223% becomes extremely representative when the lawmakers are in bed with the so-called “creative” industry and are willing to break their own laws and conventions to please their friends.

Meanwhile, another – and slightly more reliable – study (mirror) tells us that music “pirates” are actually the ones who are silly enough to spend their hard-earned money on buying music. Seeing as there are rarely any decent try-before-you-buy (or listen-before-you-buy) options available at the big digital music retailers, it’s hardly surprising that people turn to “piracy” to make sure they spend their hard-earned money on something they actually want.

The industry needs to realise they simply have to change their business model, rescind the term “intellectual property” and lobby for the change of copyright law in favour of the people: ultimately, that change will benefit the industry too. If you sell songs with Digital ‘Rights’ Management embedded in them, few people are going to buy them. If you allow people to have ownership of what they spend their money on, they will be much more inclined to pay up: it’s the way buying things works – I buy something, I get to do with it pretty much whatever I want. I can’t kill someone unpunished with a hammer I just bought, but I can listen to the song I just bought on my iPod, my Zune, my NoBrand portable music player, and I can convert it to .ogg to satisfy my dislike of proprietary file formats.
The industry needs to realise that when you try to take people’s freedom, they will not like you – but, when you give them some trust, they will give you the money you’re so desperately after and they will like you for it.

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