Madam, – I am disappointed at Eircom’s recent decision to block access from its subscribers to The Pirate Bay website. They have been pressured into censoring their users’ communications by the Irish Recorded Music Association. Other internet providers are resisting the move.
People may or may not know that this site is a collection of links to all kinds of cultural material, some of which are copyrighted. They are a search engine not unlike Google. They host absolutely no illegal material on the website itself, they only have search results that point you towards other internet users who share.
The reason for the block was not to prevent racism, paedophilia or incitement to violence. It was brought into place in order to protect the profits of the “big four” music labels, Sony BMG, Universal, EMI and Warner.
I believe that people who make music have every right to be able to sell their work. The music industry would like people to believe that sharing is the same as stealing. This has been proven false on many occasions.
Music-sharers are 10 times more likely to buy music than non-sharers. Statistics about lost revenue are grossly exaggerated.
It has been claimed in the UK that the industry has lost the equivalent of one-tenth of the British GDP. Censorship is not a solution to piracy. File-sharing didn’t stop when Napster was shut down, it certainly won’t stop when one site out of thousands is blocked from one country.
Playing a cat and mouse game with internet users is a waste of time. There will always be the next computer genius inventing a new network from his or her college dorm room.
Record labels are becoming less relevant in a world where a band can publish and promote their music to the other side of the world for free. They must accept this fact and seek to change themselves, not the world around them.
If commercial music interest groups can get Eircom to block The Pirate Bay, what’s to stop Irish authors and publishers from getting Google banned here because of their controversial book scanning agenda? If links to copyrighted materials are now banned in Ireland, what about links to links and so on? It is an absurd situation.
Music listeners have clearly expressed their taste for file-sharing. Why not capture this potential and legitimise it in ways suggested by the EFF, the Canadian Songwriters Association or the European Green Party? A new service called Spotify has got halfway there by implementing file-sharing technology to improve its service. Hopefully we’ll get to a sustainable solution before IRMA does more damage to our internet services.
I would call on the music labels to stop this “Us versus Them” approach, which alienates its customers. The RIAA in America has sued more than 30,000 people, extorting money out of decent citizens from all walks of life. Blocking websites is a knee-jerk reaction that is doomed to fail. I would ask them to try to supporting the future, instead of suing it. – Yours, etc,