As usual, Twitter provided an interesting barometer for views:

MikeKevan: The one sidedness of last nights panorama was dissapointing, felt more like scaremongering than reporting. BBC I am dissapoint.

@PiratePartyUK: #FALSE: “bittorrent means piracy” – bittorrent is an entirely legal protocol, like ftp. #debill #panorama

Growkin: the people on the panorama show are idiots “the kids take our work laptop and do what they want” IT IS YOUR WORK LAPTOP!!!
RossHaffenden: #Panorama “why don’t your go on Itunes ?” “because it costs too much”. Illegal downloaders spend twice as much on music etc SURPRISE? NOT!

The Open Rights Group’s Jim Killock felt that a lot of the programme missed the essential point: people’s rights not to be disconnected. On the ORG’s blog, he said:

This perspective was curiously underplayed in the Panorama broadcast yesterday. Instead, we mostly listened to a discussion between different musicians worrying about the future of their industry.

While that’s a concern – and the central concern of the BPI – our concern is our rights, democracy, and the future of our society, which is being built on the internet. We do not withdraw the basic tool of society without the most extreme reason. We certainly do not do such a thing without a massive public and democratic debate.

For close followers of the filesharing/music rights debate, there wasn’t anything new in the Panorama episode. Most users interviewed said they regularly used download services, although it was pointed out that filesharers spend more on music than non-filesharers. Andrew Heaney was clear about TalkTalk’s position on filesharing: “If the Secretary of State requires us to cut someone off, we will refuse to cut them off, unless a court has taken the decision that that subscriber did something wrong and they are guilty.”

Check out Panorama on iPlayer and make your own mind up. In the meantime, here’s our song: “Home Taping Is Killing Music”.

If, like me, you remember the 80s, you may also recall recording the Top 40 on Sunday nights. Up and down the country, people were hovering over their cassette players with their fingers over the pause button, trying to get the perfect recording before Tony Blackburn spoke and ruined it. Back then the music industry told us that home taping would signal the end of the music industry and that it must be stamped out. There are clear parallels with today’s debate about filesharing and the Digital Economy Bill.

That’s why we teamed up with Dan Bull, the musician behind Dear Lily and Dear Mandy, to create our very own music video. ‘Home Taping is Killing Music’ is a tongue-in-cheek video that features 80s legends Madonna, George Michael and Adam Ant (well, actually it’s just a trio of look-alikes) lip-synching to the song Top of the Pops style.

The song’s release coincides with the results of some research we conducted which found that the majority of music fans would simply switch to alternative ways of accessing copyright-protected content for free, if using peer-to-peer (P2P) services leaves them vulnerable to disconnection. In fact, 80% of 18-34 year olds questioned in our survey said that if new legislation made it dangerous to use P2P services they would switch to using methods which are undetectable.

We’ve consistently made it clear that we don’t encourage illegal filesharing. But in our view, the government’s filesharing proposals won’t change a thing – persistent filesharers will find another way of getting songs, movies and software illegally. It’s a never-ending game of cat and mouse.

Home taping didn’t kill music in the 1980s – it survived. The same will happen now in the internet age – illegal filesharing won’t kill music. And if you read the comments on the Have your Say page on www.dontdisconnect.us you’ll see that most people agree and suggest that the answer to bands making money out of their tunes lies in adopting new business models, not record companies trying to clamp down on suspected filesharers.

Paul Sanders doesn’t pull any punches when explaining how the current status quo doesn’t exactly help smaller artists:

“The market, despite all the hot air about Long Tails, has spent the last decade relatively over-rewarding the hits. If ISPs have been leeching cash out of the record business, as Bono contends in another piece of sophistry (”rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business”), then the studies are showing that it is the middle that is being slimmed, leaving a longer thinner tail and almost as fat a head as ever. 

“….big companies have every reason to keep things just as they are. That means trying to make sure that consumers spend as much money as possible on as few tracks as possible. So while in the best value deals the wholesale rate per track is hovering around 20p, you are not allowed to buy more at the same price – in fact with Sky Songs the price goes up if you want more than 20 tracks per month. 

“So perversely, if the pain of filesharing is felt disproportionately outside of the hits market, then the biggest companies have no reason to swap what they have now for a market that would give the smaller labels more chances to get paid.”

And it’s not just Paul Sanders who disagrees with Bono. We spoke to musician/blogger/teacher Steve Lawson about Paul’s Register piece, who said:

“I think the piece in The Register was a fairly typical piece by someone in his position – rightly calling Bono up on the nonsense he’s talking, but still buying into the idea that the ideal endgame is a subscription model that would ultimately still lead to a gross inequity in the distribution of that money (how on earth is ‘usage’ going to be tracked in order to distribute the money fairly?). 

“I find the lack of foresight in the thinking of the record industry baffling – I guess it’s because they are resolutely thinking of themselves as the ‘record industry’ not the ‘music industry’ and even more so as an ‘industry’ rather than as some kind of conduit for culture.”

I’m not very well qualified to propose solutions to helping the music industry’s business model – our views are entirely based around seeing that our customers’ interests are looked after – but it’s clear that not all musicians feel the same way about filesharing. For example, Canadian singer-songwriter Dan Mangan has joined the likes of Shakira, Norah Jones and Nelly Furtado in saying that filesharing isn’t necessarily evil:

“I don’t mind people sharing my music, if downloading or pirating a digital format of a song brings someone to a gig and then they have a real face to face, human interaction, maybe they bring a friend, maybe they buy a t-shirt, that’s great for me. “Even though the music industry has changed so much and people are buying less CD’s, I refuse to believe that people don’t want to support art that they believe in.”

Like I say, we’re not here to propose how musicians can earn a fair crust (and we don’t condone illegal filesharing), but with the Digital Economy Bill ignoring the realities of the situation, it’s clear to me that trying to disconnect alleged filesharers simply isn’t a solution for the music industry’s wider problems.

Others seem to agree with me – in fact, some have come up with some pretty creative ways of getting the message across as part of our Sing Our Petition competition.

Meanwhile, our blog post earlier has been reported on pcadvisor.co.uk, broadbandgenie.co.uk and computeractive.co.uk and a Twitter search on “Bono” shows that his views have been, well, mixed to say the least.

The U2 frontman is seriously misguided. ISPs generate no additional revenue or profit from customers sharing files. In fact we incur some marginal cost due to the extra bandwidth required.

It is outrageous to equate the need to protect minors from the evils of child pornography with the need to protect copyright owners. As a society we have accepted that it is appropriate and proportionate to intrude on people’s Internet use by blocking access to sites that host child abuse images. To suggest that sharing a music file is every bit as evil as child abuse beggars belief.

Incredibly, if the Digital Economy Bill as it is currently framed becomes law, it will become legal to summarily disconnect someone for alleged copyright abuse but if you want to disconnect them for accessing child abuse images then you will have to get a court order first.

The French have now abandoned plans to disconnect alleged illegal filesharers without a court order. This is a major victory for human rights campaigners and we trust Lord Mandelson will take note.

Most people think that blocking access to sites that host child abuse images is a good thing. Conversely, less than 10 per cent of us think that disconnecting alleged filesharers without a court hearing is a good idea.

Bono obviously does not understand how simple it is to access copyright protected content without being detected. P2P filesharing can be spotted (albeit at great cost) but there are dozens of applications and tools out there which allow people to view content for free and no amount of snooping can detect it.

If you think Bono is wrong then you can sign our petition.

And if you can put your opposition to the Digital Economy Bill into song or verse, then enter our competition.

Andrew Heaney

Proposals to suspend the internet connections of those who repeatedly share music and films online will leave consumers with a bill for £500 million, ministers have admitted.

The Digital Economy Bill would force internet service providers (ISPs) to send warning letters to anyone caught swapping copyright material illegally, and to suspend or slow the connections of those who refused to stop. ISPs say that such interference with their customers’ connections would add £25 a year to a broadband subscription.

To read the full story visit Times Online.

The Bill proposes that the Government can introduce new measures to punish people they think are infringing copyright without having to prove their case in court. This so-called secondary legislation side-steps any debate, oversight or public scrutiny.

“We don’t support copyright infringement in any way but we live in the real world and understand that no amount of policing and censorship will solve the problem,” said Charles Dunstone, CEO of TalkTalk Group. “It doesn’t matter how many websites are blocked, how many services are shut down or how many individuals are pursued, people will always find ways to access copyrighted content for free.

“There is an army of ‘Robin Hoods’ out there developing tools which allow completely undetectable access to content. No amount of monitoring can spot it. Shut one service down and twenty will pop up in its place.

“As things stand, victims of Wi-Fi hijacking will be caught in the cross-hairs while the most persistent offenders will remain undetected.

“Until now the proposed legislation could be best described as unwieldy and ill-conceived. In addition it now looks to deny people freedom of speech and infringe their basic human rights. Current legislation allows for people to be taken to court and a case proved against them before action is taken and that must be maintained. ’’

TalkTalk believes that to reduce illegal filesharing, music and film fans must be encouraged back to legal services through education and by making content available in a form and at a price that people find acceptable. TalkTalk’s research shows that over 85% of people think there is not enough legal music and film content available on the Internet at a fair price.

In the meantime TalkTalk makes these pledges to its customers:

• Unless we are served with a court order we will not surrender your details to rightsholders. We are the only major ISP to have taken this stance and we will maintain it.
• We will continue to fight this draconian legislation as it makes its way through Parliament.
• If we are instructed to disconnect your account due to alleged copyright infringement we will refuse to do so and tell the rightsholders we’ll see them in court.

TalkTalk’s petition against the legislation and details of how you can make you voice heard can be accessed at www.dontdisconnect.us

At time of writing there are already over 70 thought provoking responses and unsurprisingly there’s no a cry from people demanding the Government forces ISPs to cut off suspected filesharers! Some of the highlights include:

Peter Shaw (a senior solutions architect) says: “If the government are going to address this, then one of the first things they need to do is be willing to spend the money on a accurate detection system, and not just go after a person beacuse the name of an Illegal song turned up attached to their IP address, or beacuse someone thinks they use too much data.”

John Stevens (sales and marketing consultant) adds: “I would like to see an incoming government not get dragged down the route of making ISP’s responsible for policing this problem. There will never be enough certainty to ensure that someone’s connection is not being illegally “hijacked”, and the cost of authorities policing the situation is just a financial non-starter.”

Jeremy Silver (Acting-CEO at Featured Artists’ Coalition) says: “My personal belief is that legislating for technical measures on the internet is like asking a snail to act as a line judge at a football match. The speed of technological innovation and circumvention means that any preventative measures can at best be speed bumps. ”

Andrew Adams (lecturer at the University of Reading) doesn’t pull any punches: “…you need to require copyright owners to realise that they are no longer the producers of Rolls Royce cars, but the purveyors of MacDonald’s burgers and that the days of “Fruit and Flowers” at EMI headquarters are over. Only when sensible complete back catalogues of existing material are made available at sensible legitimate rates per item (a few pence or a subscription allowing access to the entire catalogue for a few pounds per month) can you make a rreasonable argument that there is not a severe market failure in the creative industries with price gouging, overly strong control and a prior capture of the legislative proces bringing copyright law into disrepute compared to modern life (including both technology and a global cultural market).”

Sarah Dixon (Programme Director & Entrepreneur) argues: “I agree with Graham Hardy – your focus should be tackling child pornography online, not piracy. Online piracy is endemic – try anonymous surveys of 13-30 year olds to discover how many access/download media online without paying for it — do you really want to anger this demographic? Do you really want to prosecute IT illiterate parents for their child’s activities?”

It’s definitely worth reading the whole thread to get the full context of everyone’s comments. We look forward to Ed Vaizey’s response…