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Carter admits u-turn on Digital Rights Agency proposals
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 5 May 2009
The great thing about a government in freefall is that if you don’t like something they propose it’s much easier to force a u-turn just by moaning loudly, because ministers are so desperately trying to find someone who might say something nice about them that they’ll drop proposals in a minute if they think someone in the room may at least nod in approval.
Anyway, Communications Minister Stephen Carter has admitted his proposals for a Digital Rights Agency to monitor online piracy and foster stronger working relationships between content owners and internet companies were dumb, dumb, dumber, and says he plans to put them through the increasingly busy government proposal paper shredder as soon as is possible.
As previously reported, despite previous indications from Culture Minister Andy Burnham, and others in the corridors of power, that government would force internet service providers to take on more of a vigilante role in policing online piracy if they wouldn’t agree to a voluntary code on such matters, when Carter published his ‘Digital Britain’ report on the future of the online and content industries there wasn’t much forcing going on.
It proposed a system whereby ISPs would have to more readily hand over the contact information of its customers to help content owners pursue direct copyright infringement lawsuits against the punters who upload or access large amounts of unlicensed content online. Which is all well and good, except even the litigious American record industry has admitted that suing infringing music fans direct is pointless – damages never cover the cost of legal action, and even thousands of such lawsuits don’t deter others from file-sharing.
Carter’s other main proposal was the Digital Rights Agency. This, however, would be more of a talking shop than a government agency directly charged with the task of taking the internet pirates down. Such an agency, many in the music business argued, was a waste of time and just a distraction. Content owners and web firms were already talking plenty, they argued, and they didn’t need a new shop to help them. And the time and effort that would be employed in establishing an Agency would better used to force the ISPs – who are still against taking on a more proactive piracy police role – to bloody do well do something about rampant online copyright infringement.
Anyway, Carter admitted that his proposals have received a negative response from the industry, and that as a result he’s now considering other options. According to Music Week, he told the Annual General Meeting of PRS For Music: “It has been torched by some, it has been tolerated by some and it has been a touchstone for others. [We need to reconsider things], but I am relaxed because it [the Agency proposal] has moved the debate on about how to write codes and who is responsible for codes”.
Translation: “That Digital Rights Agency thing we proposed – yeah, scratch that, it was a dumb idea, sorry”. Carter now proposes a greater role for his former employer OfCom with regards online piracy, as well as the establishment of a more informal discussion forum involving content owners and net firms.
UK record label trade body the BPI welcomed the u-turn. Their Director Of Public Affairs, Richard Mollet, said: “We said in our response [to the consultation] that all that was needed was a forum and it is encouraging to hear the minister now pointing in that direction”.
It’s only a week since Carter’s colleague David Lammy, Minister For Intellectual Property, was telling the Guardian that the Digital Rights Agency was the best possible way to tackle online piracy. Not sure if he was at the PRS AGM to be updated on the latest change in government policy.
Talking of a Labour government on the slide into the abyss, the Conservative Party has been trying to get some brownie points (which, strangely, Gordon Brown is lacking at the moment) from the music business by criticising Burnham, Carter and Lammy’s efforts to protect and extend record labels’ copyrights. Commenting on their efforts to combat rising online piracy and to extend the copyright term for sound recordings at a European level, the Tory’s culture spokesman Jeremy Hunt told Music Week last week: “No, I don’t think the government has done enough. Piracy has been around for a while, but frustratingly it has done nothing and term was very disappointing for the music industry”.
Criticising Carter’s aforementioned ‘Digital Britain’ for being “weak on action”, he said he was conducting his own review of the UK’s creative industries, and would be involving Universal Music International boss Lucian Grainge, former Warner and BPI director Rob Dickins and Classic FM MD Darren Henley in it.
