Following reading this yesterday

"Thousands of file-sharers facing legal action announces International Federation of the Phonographic Industry"  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6058912.stm

I feel compelled to try and do more on this issue and thought I might find a sympathetic audience here. Below is an article that I wrote following the first convictions for file-sharing in this country back in January, after which I started a small campaign in Brighton to raise funds for one of those convicted, who happened to be a local postman. After a couple of fundraising concerts, 130 pounds has so far been raised towards his 1500 pound fine and more shows will be forthcoming until the full total is reached.

However, upon reading the above article yesterday it becomes ever clearer that the scale of my efforts are completely inadequate and so I post this here in the hope of establishing contact with other people as concerned as I am about this issue so that the serious organising and protest that is required on a national level can begin. These cases will only stop when enough people demonstrate that they will not accept the record industry's attempts to dictate how people experience music and this will only happen when the lie of their claim to ownership over music is exposed, ironically, for the piracy it is.

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A fine mess

“People who file-share are stealing the future of artists and the people who invest in them”, according to Peter Jamieson, chairman of the British Phonographic Institute, the body which represents major record companies in the UK. No mistake there then – an industry famous for its motherly mollycoddling of musicians (what was that small print in the record deal?) cares so much about these artists future that it is with great regret that at the end of January they had to win the first civil convictions for copyright violation in this country for the activity of sharing music over the internet. Under the 1988 Copyright Designs and Patents Act outlawing the making of an unauthorised copy of protected material, meaning that this judgement could apply to all forms of music reproduction from the making of a humble tape to burning a CD, two men have been ordered to pay immediate fines of £5000 and £1500 respectively as compensation to the BPI, with the promise of tens of thousands in costs and damages to come. The BPI is very sorry it has to be this way but at the same time is heralding the decision as a landmark in their fight against “illegal file-sharing”.

If it were all about compensation and investments as Peter Jamieson wants to believe then perhaps there would be nothing more to worry about than at any other High Court goings-on but it would appear that music is rather more important to a great many people than just numbers on a balance sheet. If the unfairness of this arbitrary making an example out of a few random downloaders weren’t bad enough, the instant criminalising of a large section of the population is a major cause for concern as a result of this judgement. At the same time as measures are being taken in France to legalise peer-to-peer file-sharing, unfortunately we once again find that we are living in the 51st state with these intimidatory scare tactics of the BPI having been copied in a way probably somewhat more than authorised from the Record Industry Association of Americas 3 year long campaign to lock up the fifth of the US population listening to music without their permission. It seems that “home-taping is killing music” has become “file-sharing is a threat to life as we know it”, given the use of Anti-Terrorism laws to try and gain access to information held by internet service providers about file-sharers, with this extra dose of hysteria helping drive matters over the edge to introducing the long arm of the law into proceedings.

You may ask yourself how issues concerning copyright ever came to be applied to music in the first place and, behind the technicalities, there are two simple answers to this question that tend to crop up a lot when anything to do with Intellectual Property Rights is involved – corruption and coercion. This is because the basic motivation behind Intellectual Property law is an attempt to gain monopoly control of access to a certain intangible resource, with a corresponding guarantee of vast profits. Therefore all such measures ultimately only serve those with the status and money to write the legislation and pay the lawyers to bring their wishes into an enforceable reality. The same story is repeated across the world in countless different areas – from farmers convicted for saving seed on the grounds of infringing corporate patents to medical researchers tangled up in the legal knots tied around the genetic building blocks of life to the tribulations of the open source software movement. In all these cases diversity suffers while the imperative of corporate profit grows ever stronger as the hopelessly confused theoretical justification for the very concept of Intellectual Property is overcome by the sheer weight of commercial interest. There must be some good reason why one of the very first acts of the US occupation in Iraq was to impose US intellectual property standards and, in a frightening juxtaposition, the son of the oil magnate Jean-Paul Getty has said that “Intellectual Property is the oil of the 21st century”. Put those two together and go figure that perhaps it won’t just be fines for downloading music in the future as momentum gathers behind this latest potentially all-encompassing vehicle of corporate greed, which is already enshrined at the highest level of global law in the TRIPs (Trade Related aspects of Intellectual Property) agreement of the WTO.

For now, the record industries sham about protecting the livelihoods of musicians cannot hide the reality of its history of crude exploitation of a shared human heritage, with the notions of harmony and rhythm we take as given in our enjoyment of music in fact demonstrably built up during an incalculable process of development over countless generations across the world. Those chancers who in the last century somehow decided they could chop it up and own it, creating marketable products through the use of various media outlets, gave birth to the bemoth of the record industry, which now behaves like it wants to turn the world into one big high-school talent show that they can choose the winners of – that being themselves. Indeed the charges of piracy levelled against file-sharers arguably make more sense when reversed, with it being those seeking to own and prosecute that are doing the stealing from everyone else. But such a view is rarely heard in a debate entirely skewed by the action of media power serving commercial interests, thereby only representing the views of those producing and selling music and forgetting that this part of our culture belongs just as much to everyone else as it does to them, and indeed that without the people who listen to music, they wouldn’t have a livelihood in the first place.

Of course musicians need to be rewarded for their work, I speak as one myself, but surely they can do better than the method now being enforced by the BPI which seems like it wants to put a good section of their audience and probably at least a few would-be musicians as well in court. The implications of the independent distribution of music over the internet are vast and if they didn’t keep announcing such ridiculously huge record profits it would almost be plausible to say that these court actions are the last ditch struggles for survival of people in panicked boardrooms who know they are irreversibly heading for the exit. The only thing that will make that a reality is direct action by all those concerned with music and the wider scourge of Intellectual Property, from those who would seek to establish a creative commons as an alternative to copyright to others who would wish to completely deny the possibility of any ownership of something like music, given the history of other more tangible commons. Either way, these convictions for file-sharing mark a step too far in the attempts of the record industry to dictate how people experience music and whether they like it or not people will continue to share music in whatever way they can because, in a particularly tuneful irony, this act is fundamental to making music itself.
Let the band play on...

Some examples of sharing in music:

Hip-hop – gotta make a tape now...and sampling? The whole world is music…

Dub – Version! An entire musical genre based on messing around with someone else’s music.

Jungle – rinse it out. Where would the world be at 4am in a warehouse without the Amen break, an entire culture emerges from a few seconds of a drummer getting wicked.

Classical – Haydn had more than a handle on his Handel

Jazz – you cant breathe in a vacuum, and Kenny G cant destroy the work of the lifetimes of the genius’s who painted their pictures in the colours of classic standards.

Pop – you know it but you don’t know you know it...There are computers working out how to press all those subliminal buttons right now.

Techno – 808, 303...not mathematical equations but the names of the machines used more often than not. That means the same sounds put together in different ways millions of times.

Folk – music of the people? All of them?

Blues – how many times can you play the same 12 bar pattern? Quite a lot it would seem...bet that persons kicking themself now that they didn’t know about copyright – they’ve probably got the intellectual property blues, “woke up this morning, feel round for my legalistic tool of aggression”...good job they didn’t find it.

Other examples from around the world undoubtedly prevalent and welcome...