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Bellamy muses on the issue
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 17 September 2009
Lily Allen also revealed that Muse frontman Matt Bellamy had emailed her on the subject of P2P. He seems to be supporting the proposal that you allow file-sharing but set up some kind of blanket licensing system for the ISPs, which has been much mooted over the years, especially by the indie labels.
Allen pasted Bellamy’s musings (ha ha ha – see what I did there?) on the subject, which went as follows: “My current opinion is that file-sharing is now the norm. This cannot be changed without an attack on perceived civil liberties, which will never go down well. The problem is that the ISPs making the extreme profits (due to millions of broadband subscriptions) are not being taxed by the copyright owners correctly and this is a legislation issue. Radio stations and TV stations etc have to pay the copyright owners (both recording and publishing) a fee for using material they do not own. ISPs should have to pay in the same way with a collection agency like PRS doing the monitoring and calculations based on encoded (but freely downloaded) data. Broadband makes the internet essentially the new broadcaster. This is the point which is being missed”.
Bellamy apparently suggested he and Lily have a meeting with Peter Mandelson, which would be interesting, not least because I’m not sure the two popsters have the same viewpoint on the issue.
And if Lily does now agree with Matt, well, in some ways Virgin Media and Sky’s proposed all-you-can-eat MP3 download services are a step towards the ISP-funded blanket licensing system Bellamy proposes, and, as previously reported, it’s EMI, Sony and possibly Warner who are likely to scupper those plans. So perhaps Allen and Bellamy should have tea with their own labels’ chiefs instead of bothering Pete.
