It Takes Two to Tango

This January’s Music & Technology conference, hosted at London’s Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (RSA), turned an opportunity to explore the implications of copyright and copyleft for the arts into a promotional vehicle for the corporate attack on free information exchange. Armin Medosch reports

Music & Technology, a conference at the RSA on Thursday 15th of January 2004, was seeking to encourage the industry to embrace the internet but only succeeded in highlighting the trouble both still had with each other.

The Great Room of the RSA with its painting The Progress of Human Knowledge and Culture gave a suitably bizarre background to this conference, sponsored by ACE, NESTA and BT. The intention was to address issues around copyright protection, file sharing, intellectual property and the internet in a more balanced way and within a broader intellectual framework. This was not intended to be another launch-pad for the music industry’s campaign for the criminalisation of file-sharing fans. 'Fair use' is not an exception to the rule, generously granted to us by rightholders. But even when it seemed that the internet faction was winning the debate, the record industry and its allies managed to obfuscate the terms of the debate with a blitz of disinformation like something out of Mars Attacks.

That said, proceedings already started sliding towards the farcical on opening the media pack. Inside was a message of support from Estelle Morris, Minister for the Arts, where she states initially that the conference acts 'as a timely reminder to protect creators’ rights', but then goes on to identify 'the very serious issue of copyright theft and piracy' as the main problem. Thank you minister, but unfortunately this was off message for a conference which should have spent as much time looking into how important it is that we protect our cultural heritage and contemporary discourses in art and science from copyright over-protection and extremely harmful knowledge limiting mechanisms that are guaranteed by law.

One consensus was at least established quickly: everybody seemed to agree that 'there will always be people who want to make music and people who want to listen to it.' The fencing in of the consumer, how to 'get them for life', with their 360 degree services, how to make them pay, pay and pay, has been the industry’s game for a long time. Any suggestion that they would suddenly change was certainly naïve. The idea that part of the internet's promise was to enable the user becoming a co-producer of the work was not aired once during the whole day. There was no productive debate about the breaking up of the consumer paradigm into a much more diverse variety of copyright ecologies.

Instead we got panels populated by stern white and (mostly) elderly men who could only think of one question, it seemed, how to milk the 'consumer cow'. The most passionate speech for the internet and 'good music' came from Tim Clark who unfortunately is involved with Robbie Williams’ career as a dealmaker or something. Talk about hypocrites!

What the industry is trying to hammer home quoting an unnamed independent study, the numbers of peer-to-peer users is sinking. After the success of the iPod, industry big chief Larry Kenswil from Universal declared the future had also arrived for his company, since they had at last started to offer a legal download service. By bringing online more legal offerings of their releases the industry hopes to outlaw the remaining untamed exchange bourses. But are they in tune with reality or do they keep deceiving themselves?

As Wayne Rosso, formerly president of Grokster and a P2P activist explained, there has actually been no fall in P2P usership, just a slight decrease in the growth rate, and he suggested that in a week there would be more files shared than downloaded from 'legal’ services like iTunes. It came as another blow for the industry that David Vaver, Professor of Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law at Oxford University, quietly stated that file sharing was not illegal in the UK. But on which grounds then would Andrew Yeates from the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) carry out his threat to sue P2P users in the UK, a claim that had come out in an article on the BBC website the day before the conference. Yeates simply ignored the content of the question when this was addressed and caught himself mid Freudian slip when he retorted that P2P would 'undermine' instead of underpin the need for better protection of copyright.

Feargal Sharkey gave a passionate appeal for, err, nothing really specific at all, but surely something had to change. BT were allowed to portray themselves as the competent technical facilitators who could not just build the networks but also have a 'superbly efficient billing engine'. They are about to offer O2 customers downloads of singles for £1.50, which is a bit rich, and pass the blame for the high pricing on to the labels who made it hard to cut a deal, the BT man said. The long panel about royalties collection made it convenient to have a little nap just to wake up in time for the machine-gun presentation of facts about sleaze in the industry by Jenny Toomey from the Future of Music Coalition and the closing remarks by Lawrence Lessig. If this conference had been arranged to set the record straight in a debate that was permanently distorted by one-sided Recording Industry Association of America and BPI propaganda it had certainly failed.

Surely the consensus is that the music industry does not hold an infinite 'licence to veto the future'. But watching the constant propaganda that is emanating from mainstream media in the week since, one must fear for the worst. It will need a lot more than just education to stop the flow of disinformation. What do a BBC 1 TV business news editor and an Independent technology editor intend by publishing highly biased BPI propaganda as if it was all objective truth? Why do they leave the reports on which those findings are based unnamed and unchallenged? What is behind this continuing misrepresentation of a major subject in the UK’s 'quality media'? And what can we expect from politicians considering the poor quality of press reporting? There is a lot of work to be done before the world moves to a more sensible IP regime. The current consumer-cow-milking consensus among musicians, labels and middle men cannot be the solution.

Music and Technology: Policy Frameworks for the Future:http://www.rsa.org.uk/events/detail.asp?eventID=1437