Adam Banks
The government seeks to protect copyright by coming down hard on infringers, but surely a more flexible approach would be better for everyone…
Nobody was shocked when the Secretary of State for Business announced three strikes. There could be a lot more than that by the end of the winter. As it turned out, though, he wasn’t talking about industrial action: Lord Mandelson was resurrecting the proposal to cut off your access to the Internet if you’re accused of infringing copyright. Like privatising the Royal Mail, he probably doesn’t see why this is controversial.
As befits his multi-portfolio portfolio, the First Secretary was speaking at a conference organised by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the ministry set up to strengthen the bond between the conceptual art and yngling industries. The DCMS project that hosted the event is called – brace yourself for some post-modern Media Studies typographic shenanigans here – ‘c&binet’. See what they did there? Yes, they made up something that sounded cool in a meeting.
It’s supposed to stand for creativity, business and, er, the interwebs or something. Among the policy conundrums officially assigned to this awkwardly defined talking shop is the supply-side poser, ‘What can be done to create opportunities for the next generation of creative talent?’ We can’t have all that creative talent sitting around on its arse, after all. With a college on every corner doing arts diplomas that nobody fails, it had better have some opportunities to go to.
If job creation is the kind of creativity they had in mind, they’ve made a start with ‘ambassador’ roles for 26 of the industry’s great and good. You can guess the names: Cond?© Nast’s Nicholas Coleridge, Microsoft’s J Allard, Random House boss Gail Rebuck, Honorary Professor of Media Studies Phil Redmond… As a panel, it has the proper quangocratic mix of the clever and the posh. Maybe they should have called it c&pboard.
Aside from handing out the Ferrero Rocher, these luminaries were tasked (I just have a feeling they used the word ‘tasked’) with ‘shaping the c&binet agenda’. And the result? A conference that produces one solitary national news headline, and it’s nothing to do with creativity, but Dr Spin’s relaunch of an already discredited policy that’s about as popular with your Guardian-reading creative professional as section 28. Way to demonstrate your media skills.
Emboldened by the European Parliament cave-in that had allowed Nicolas Sarkozy, on the second attempt, to shrug his three strikes law through a reluctant French National Assembly, Mandelson insisted that direct action against infringers (aka you and me) was the only way to ‘have sustainable creative industries’, but promised that ISPs wouldn’t be ‘unfairly burdened’.
Why should they be burdened at all? ISPs don’t profit from file sharing. When not caning BitTorrent, their customers spend the rest of the day on Facebook. They’d be paying for a connection either way, and stressing the network less if they skipped the audio-visual freebies. What makes it all the more ironic is that copyright owners are now desperate to promote legal downloading. Via what, pigeon post? Asking ISPs to ‘give something back’ by sharing the cost of harassing their own users is like funding an anti-litter campaign by taxing the makers of dustbins.
Some have suggested that Lord Mandleson’s deeply principled support for attack-dog copyright enforcement dates from August, when he and David Geffen, the billionaire content mogul, shared the hospitality of Nat Rothschild, who was investigated last year for illegally contributing to John McCain’s campaign against Barack Obama. Even The Daily Mail, despite the lack of an asylum-seeker angle, couldn’t help noting that the President of the Board of Trade returned from his trip expressing views that would traditionally be associated less with populist centre-left administrations and more with, well, David Geffen.
In fact, however, he’s held those views for years. Hauling the little guy over the coals for failing to pay the big guy hardly sounds like a vote winner, but worrying about votes is so Old Labour. What really matters is influence, and you get that from the big guy.
If Mandelson wasn’t exactly bottled off the podium, that may reflect the fact that almost every c&binet ambassador represents a content owner, and none represent consumers. Still, the conference saw some lively and open debate on copyright among those less clingy to the status quo. Truly creative people, as opposed to those who live off them, are not natural supporters of the oppressive enforcement of negative rights. Nor, if polls are to be believed, are the British public – and that must still count for something. What both they and their creative industries need now is not rigid legislation but flexible thinking.
