The contentious Digital Economy Bill has been hurried through the UK Parliament to the dismay of many members of the pubic and of Parliament. The DEBill as it is known aims to deliver greater copyright protection to the digital creative arts in the
The Government saw this as an essential tool in saving ‘hundreds of millions lost from the digital creative arts industry’. Anger has followed the superquick passing of the bill as it was heard during the wash-up period that comes in to play following an announcement of a general election and politicians on all sides said they were concerned that a bill of such importance was not heard and debated properly within Westminster.
However, I take issue with the amounts being bounced around – I would suggest that these are based on a simple ‘number of downloads x DVD/CD cost’. This is surely not emblematic of a ‘true cost of piracy’ as there was no guarantee that a downloader chose to download a file rather than pay for it. The person in question might never have bought the item if the option to acquire the file through a torrent or other method was unavailable so therefore you cannot say that the revenue was ‘lost’ – it was never likely to be there in the first place. Many argued that the sales of media actually rose for the first time since 2002, poking holes in the argument of lost income even further.
I still think of this along the lines of the famous copyleft t-shirt seen above – the digital industry failed to embrace the technological changes that have come in recent years yet continues to hold on to the notion of controlling the retail channels in the old-fashioned way – supply and demand. Everything is reversed now and the quicker the creative industries realise that and adapt, the better.
