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Government’s culture man talks tough on copyright at BPI AGM

By | Published on Tuesday 2 September 2014

Sajid Javid

The government’s culture man, former city boy Sajid Javid, talked tough about copyright enforcement at the Annual General Meeting of record industry trade group the BPI yesterday; though his list of government-supported measures for combating piracy was mainly a summary of existing initiatives, albeit with some frank remarks (and a small threat) regarding the role of Google in combating copyright infringement online.

After nearly five months atop the government’s culture ministry, Javid did a good job of demonstrating his passion for a role which is – at the end of the day – a stepping stone job for any ambitious politician, and Javid is a very ambitious politician. He did the customary big-up of his audience that’s expected at events like this (‘British music is awesome, isn’t it? And it’s all down to you guys’), before listing the cultural funding and music education initiatives the coalition government has introduced, and name-checking the Live Music Act.

But for an audience of mainly record label people, copyright and piracy will always be near the top of the agenda, “and I completely understand why” said the ministry man. “Without enforceable copyright there would be no A&R, no recording studios, no producers, no session musicians, no publicity, no artwork. None of the vital ingredients that take the music created made by talented artists and turn it into something the whole world can enjoy. It’s what your past success was built on, and it’s what your future success depends on”.

He went on: “I know some people say the IP genie is out of the bottle and that no amount of wishing will force it back in. But I don’t agree with them. We don’t look at any other crimes and say ‘It’s such a big problem that it’s not worth bothering with’. We wouldn’t stand idly by if paintings worth hundreds of millions of pounds were being stolen from the National Gallery. Copyright infringement is theft, pure and simple”.

Fortuitously for Javid, after several years of frustration within the record industry that the copyright elements of the 2010 Digital Economy Act, which the labels lobbied so hard for, came pretty much to nothing, while the David Cameron-commissioned Hargreaves Review of intellectual property law mainly resulted in more copyright exemptions, in the last year there has been more progress in the anti-piracy domain. So the new Culture Minister had things to report on.

Like Creative Content UK, that recent festival of copyright industry quotage that aims to introduce a ‘lite version’ of the DEA’s three-strikes system for combating piracy, alongside a raft of certain-to-be-awful education programmes. “As an industry-led initiative rather than a top-down government one, it will be quicker, more responsive and cheaper to enact”, said the minister.

And then there’s been the Cameron-endorsed work of the former music and movie industry man in Parliament, Mike Weatherley. “I know many of you worked closely with Mike as he was producing his recent reports into the role of search engines and ‘following the money'”, said Javid. “The reports certainly raised some interesting and important points. We’re now looking at them carefully and I’m considering how best to move forward; you can expect to hear more from me on this in the coming months”.

And, perhaps most importantly in terms of tangible results, there’s the government-funded City Of London Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit. “The first unit of its kind in the world”, Javid noted. “PIPCU is working with industry groups – including the BPI – on the Infringing Websites List. The list identifies sites that deliberately and consistently breach copyright, so brand owners can avoid advertising on them. A pilot scheme saw a 12% drop in advertising from major household brands, the kind of big names that lend legitimacy to illegal sites”.

Javid, like Weatherley, endorses the ‘follow the money’ policy for fighting piracy, based on the assumption that most piracy outfits are run for profit (many are, though not all by any means), and therefore if you cut off their revenue streams they’ll shut down. “I said earlier you work in music because you love it”, Javid remarked. “Copyright crooks don’t love music. They love money, and they’ve been attracted to the industry solely by its potential to make them rich. Take away their profits and you take away their reason for being”.

Though, the minister conceded that, for all this, their remains an elephant in the room, which isn’t sensible in a plush central London hotel. “Let me be absolutely clear that I completely agree with Mike Weatherley when he says that the search engines also have to play their part. They must step up and show willing. That’s why Vince Cable and I have written to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, asking them to work with you to stop search results sending people to illegal sites. And let me be perfectly clear: if we don’t see real progress, we will be looking at a legislative approach”.

Quite what that “legislative approach” would be is far from clear. The Digital Economy Act was legislation designed to force the resistant internet service providers into a piracy-policing role, but in the main it achieved little. And realistically any legislative stick to force Google’s hand won’t come this side of the 2015 General Election. Though ‘play ball or Parliament will force you’ is always a useful fallback line when negotiating with tech companies on copyright issues, and the record industry’s lobbyists will find those 20 words of Javid’s speech the most useful.

More useful than the minister’s concluding remark, name checking one of the record industry’s more useless anti-piracy initiatives, Music Matters. Said Javid: “We are on your side and we want to help and support you. Because you are the best in the world at what you do. Because you make a huge and vital contribution to British life and British business. And because – to the government, to my department, and to me personally – music really does matter”.

Read the speech in full here.



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