For Broadcast June 04, 2009

Today six million people in the UK are stealing music and other content illegally through P2P file sharing. That’s a lot of piracy sucking money from the creative industries. As many in the music/film/TV business already know, something has to be done.

The question of what to do is where the consensus breaks down. Talk to a Hollywood studio or a music label and they say internet service providers should be policing and shutting down pirates. Talk to ISPs, and it’s the content providers that should take pirates to court.

Andy Burnham at the DCMS is caught right in the middle and as time ticks down to the publication of the Digital Britain report, the flow of traffic through his office on this issue looks like a busy server coping with requests to hear Susan Boyle sing.

But Burnham has made up his mind on one thing: illegal downloading is one of the key areas where he says legislation is required if the practice is to be curbed. And he realises that there must be a coordinated international approach as well, as he explained to the Broadcasting Press Guild earlier this week, which is why he plans to try to establish “an international memorandum on downloading”.

This is a step in the right direction because although I am all for educating the media consumer about how their pirate actions undermine the music/film/TV business, free is difficult to compete against. Burnham may believe that some kind of legislation is needed - but he also does not want to “criminalise young people” by passing laws that take a “draconian and punitive approach”. The right approach, according to Burnham, is to encourage behaviour online that favours legal sites and business models. The problem is that industry players have been slow to create legal alternatives. There are some like iTunes and Hulu, but not enough.

And creative businesses are loathe to disrupt their current business models while there is still life in them. Simply preserving the old business models is a rear-guard action that can only buy a certain amount of time. A law against illegal downloading should be part of Digital Britain and would give teeth to any education or warning system about pirate content. But the industry also must face up to the new business models necessary to survive in a 2.0 age. If not, there won’t be much of a creative industry to preserve.