WIRED:TO DO well in the music and movie businesses, a thousand song and film cliches tell us, you have to have a special kind of ruthless business brilliance. From the Warner Brothers to Virgin, from Sam Goldwyn to Col Tom Parker and Brian Epstein, even when you have the greatest talents on earth on your side, a good manager still has to be ingenious and work hard to make money.
Which is why, reading the letters from the Irish Recorded Music Association (Irma) to Irish internet service providers (ISPs), I am staggered by the music companies’ current short- sightedness and poor strategy.
An industry that takes the favourite songs of a few talented artists and turns them into a billion-dollar industry deserves better than this poorly considered thuggery.
The letters, sent to members of the internet industry, follow Irma’s settlement with Eircom last month. The settlement fended off a legal battle that Irma would have lost, either in court or in practice. Irma was demanding that Eircom place music filters in the heart of its internet operation, which would somehow monitor all net communications for tunes, and then block the traffic if a melody owned by the major record labels was detected.
The court case echoed one in Belgium which briefly had the world’s record labels excited: a judge agreed that such a filter would be enforced on a local European ISP. A few months later, that court order was rescinded after it became apparent that such filtering didn’t work.
The final decision in the case is still awaited in Belgium, but that hasn’t stop the music industry from using the same threats in Ireland: threats to which Eircom capitulated and which are now being renewed against other ISPs.
It seems a poor strategy for Irma. In order for it to work, all ISPs would have to agree to the music label’s conditions, which include throwing net users offline after three accusations by Irma and implementing a censorship blacklist of websites the music industry does not like.
If only a few ISPs follow Irma’s orders, the rest of their market will suddenly have a fantastic advantage over those which comply: an unfiltered internet, without arbitrary interruptions from third parties. The ISPs that implement Irma’s blacklist will effectively find themselves on consumer blacklists, as companies that pay more attention to legal rumblings than maintaining their own customers’ networks.
While the agreement with Eircom remains secret in its details, it seems to be the case that under Irma’s plans, the vassal ISPs are expected to cover some of the costs of implementing these blocking and surveillance schemes. For all but a former state monopoly, such costs will bite into the razor-thin profits of running a net provider.
Smaller ISPs won’t want to pay such costs and will relish having a unique selling point against the titan of Irish internet. Bigger ISPs like UPC Broadband and British Telecom have considerable markets outside the State and know full well that if they give in here, they will be vulnerable to similar attacks by publishers, local music, movie and television companies reps in all other countries, with higher costs, more bureaucracy and the same level of vulnerability to competition.
To be lectured on how the internet should work and exactly how the paying customers of ISPs should be treated is painful enough from another unrelated sector. But an unrelated sector that, by its own protestations, is unable to understand how to scrape an honest profit from the net, whose revenues, even in good years, are dwarfed by that of those who make their money from telecommunications and innovating through modern telecommunications and who attempt to exact their demands through legal letters: that is a source to be ignored.
Irma must know the greatest danger to its plans is that, after receiving this shocking mail (see it at www. blackoutireland.com), the ISPs confer and realise that collectively, they are in a far better position standing up to Irma’s threats than individually lying down and taking it without complaint.
That is why, I am sure, Irma demanded a response within seven days to its letter of February 13th – so that companies would be tempted to give in to the threats immediately. Of course, after that deadline passed, no further threats were heard.
Smaller internet companies received a snippier letter giving them seven further days to consider their options; larger companies, with their own banks of lawyers, were not dignified with a response. Irma’s bare-faced legal threats have so far failed.
Frankly, I don’t see any well- run company complying with Irma’s scheme. As it is, if the music and movie industries wish to enter into a business relationship with the Irish internet, they should do what the rest of us do: choose a firm that does what they want and then pay them the market wage to do it.
While they are at it, they might want to start doing what most of us have been telling them to do all along: learn to treat their fans not as criminals, but as their future.
Irma’s current madcap scheme is barely better than suing grannies for their filesharing. It is offensive to the ISP’s real customers and unlikely to do much but lower the world’s already Mariana- Trench-level opinion of the music labels’ current arrogance – and long-term financial future.
If you’d like to join those protesting the ban, visit www. blackoutireland.com – a bunch of consumers who seem far more together than Irma will ever be.
