Says fight against child porn and success by Chinese govt in content tracking prove fight against illegal file-sharing is winnable, and that P2P is rewarding ISPs “whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business.”
Back in March of last year U2 frontman Bono blasted file-sharers for turning music into “tap water” and then lamented that the “Internet has emasculated rather than liberated artists.”
Many gave the singer a pass for his noble efforts in the fight against poverty and hunger around the world, but that may now change.
In an op-ed for the NY Times, Bono lays out his Ten for the Next Ten, ten ideas that “might make the next 10 years more interesting, healthy or civil,” he says.
One of them is the idea that we need additional protection for intellectual property developers to better protect them in the age of digital distribution.
For this he suggests we need ISP-level content filtering and mocks their “dumb pipe” defense.
“We’re the post office, they tell us; who knows what’s in the brown-paper packages? But we know from America’s noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China’s ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it’s perfectly possible to track content,” he says.
Efforts to fight child porn and a massive intrusion by an overzealous totalitarian regime are hardly good comparisons to what is possible to solve a problem that is largely self-inflicted.
Bono causally says it’s possible to “track content” without pondering what they actually means. It means inspecting each and every data packet transmitted across an ISPs network and for what? To find the Eagle’s “Hotel California?” It will be the equivalent of a mandatory pat-down regardless of guilt or suspicion, certainly a violation of the 4th amendment, and can easily be bypassed in a number of ways.
Adding to his criticism of ISPs he says they’ve gotten rich from P2P and that they’re financial gains “perfectly mirror” the music industry’s losses.
“A decade’s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators — in this case, the young, fledgling songwriters who can’t live off ticket and T-shirt sales like the least sympathetic among us — and the people this reverse Robin Hooding benefits are rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business,” he says.
ISPs may be getting richer, but it’s not solely because of P2P. The world is increasingly going online with everything from the morning news to social networking sites like Facebook becoming an integral part of people’s daily lives.
Decreasing music sales have a number of reasons and P2P is not the only one. Digital singles are also to blame. A formerly $20 physical CD has been reduced to a measly 99 cents track on Apple’s iTunes. ISPs aren’t to blame for that one, it’s the greedy music labels who’ve fought consumers every step of the way to prevent them from getting what they actually want and at a fair price.
As for the supposed harm to “young, fledgling songwriters” Bono seems to know little about the business he’s in and seems to be against an even cursory amount of research. For a Harvard study from June of last year found that the number of albums being produced is greater than ever.
“Consumer access to recordings has vastly improved since the advent of file-sharing,” it concludes. “Since 2000, the number of recordings produced has more than doubled. In our view, this makes it difficult to argue that weaker copyright protection (as a result from illegal file-sharing) has had a negative impact on artists’ incentives to be creative.”
That’s right doubled.
“While file sharing disrupted some traditional business models in the creative industries, foremost in music, in our reading of the evidence there is little to suggest that the new technology has discouraged artistic production,” it furthers. “Weaker copyright protection, it seems, has benefited society.”
So if music artists are still creating and are doing so more than ever where’s the harm to the “young, fledgling songwriters” he laments?
His words echo statements from his band manager Paul McGuiness who has said that ISPs and the music biz should forge “commercial partnerships,” that Radiohead’s In Rainbows experiment “backfired,” and also praised France for passing a controversial “three-strikes” law that will somehow save artists from having their “livelihoods destroyed, their career ambitions stolen.”
Other artists like Kid Rock think it’s funny that the music industry, who for years ripped off everyone and anyone it could, is now the one crying foul.
“Back in the day, we all know the stories of the Otis Reddings and Chuck Berrys and Fats Dominos who never got paid,” Kid Rock said back in 2008. “So the internet was an opportunity for everyone to be treated fairly, for the consumer to get a fair price, for the artist to be paid fairly, for the record companies to make some money. But they stuck to the old system.”
Atlantic Records had even apparently asked Rock a few years ago to “stand up for illegal downloading” because “people are stealing from us and stealing from you.”
“Wait a second, you’ve been stealing from the artists for years,” he countered. “Now you want me to stand up for you?”
At least he gets it. Kid Rock’s main passion is playing live music and thinks that selling CDs is just a way to reach an audience and convince them to turn out and support him.
“I was telling kids – download it illegally, I don’t care,” he says. “I want you to hear my music so I can play live.”
Imagine that, an artist actually wanting to play before a crowd.
“Note to self: Don’t get over-rewarded rock stars on this bully pulpit,” Bono adds.
Note to Bono: I’d take your own advice. For a reminder ask Metallica what exile feels like.
Stay tuned.
Stay tuned.
fucking hypocrite. Supposedly standing up for human rights all over the world but wants to adopt totalitarian Internet censorship here as in China.
its time to tank on bozo the clown here.
lets bankrupt this guy.
Fuck off Bono , you prick . i liked you better in southpark
Yeah great, Big Brother Bono is watching us. Ass.
Hey Bono, Yea China did it, do you know why… its called a DICTATORSHIP where leaders can do as they please without answering to their public and simply looking up, oh, say the tiannamen (sorry not spelled correctly) square incedent for instance should be blocked?
The day you start trying to relegate the internet and tell people what they can and cant look at (aka your media) is the day you should move to one of those nice little countries like North Korea, you’ll love it there, I promise
Bono should stop crying about how the piracy is hurting the artists……..OMG THINK OF THE POOR ARTISTS.
OK, no read this and at least stop thinking about poor old Bono and the rest of U2.
“Irish rock band U2 have been named the most successful artists of the North American tour of 2009, according to concert tracking publication Pollstar.”
http://www.themoneytimes.com/featured/20100101/u2-named-most-successful-artists-american-tour-2009-id-1095699.html
Well, Bono sure is not hurting.It’s time for people like him to step into the new age..They have used technology to create music that they cannot possibly re-create at a live concert.Now they should use it to come up with a new form of marketing if they put there heads together…and how can he even relate to bands at the other end of the spectrum.In the end it is all a game with money as the bottom line.He should move to China if he likes their rule of law.Ironically.he would feed the hungry child for free,but would not freely feed their musical appetite But that’s the business that he is in.
Yet another example of some pr-benenvolent multimillionaire constantly on a mission for world peace decrying foreign “regimes” for their methods, yet completely content with those methods if they pertain to their bottoms lines.
So the end justifies the means at all costs.
Total content monitoring to enforce political trends = evil regime
Total content monitoring to enforce your bottom line = totally acceptable
Don’t these people even realize anymore how hypocritical that crap is they parrot after their label handlers?!?
Might just have to go out and buy one of those “Bono is a Tw*t t-shirts”… Just hope he doesn’t recieve any money from them…
The problem with Bono is that his note about how China is fighting child pornography and therefore, content is trackable simply proves he is either uneducated about the issues facing music today or is willfully being blind to the facts at hand.
As I recall, first of all, China’s master plan when filtering the internet was to kill all forms of porn – not just child porn. It was an effort to “cleanse” the internet. That’s the official reason for China’s government to isse crack downs.
Of course, you’d have to never have heard of the Great Firewall of China or have no idea what China’s track record on human rights are to subscribe to the notion that China has all the answers when it comes to filtering the internet.
Even if one were to subscribe to the notion that China’s model is the way to go has no idea that even China’s censorship tactics are defeatable. Green Dam was defeated. Blog crackdowns were defeated. Blocking of websites were also defeated. Look at the last ten years of technology and different entities trying to control it. The internet, thus far, has a 100% win rate.
Second of all, trying to say that artists are starving because of file-sharing is like saying time travel exists. Are artists starving now? Yes. Were they starving before file-sharing? Yes. Blaming the starvation on file-sharing is like blaming guns for all the deaths in the world. It doesn’t work if you have any clue about history. Guns are a relatively new phenominon compared to death.
Thirdly, arguing that file-sharing is killing the industry is the same tired and debunked argument we’ve heard over and over. Saying these falsehoods over and over doesn’t make it true. If file-sharing didn’t exist, I wouldn’t be an artist today. That’s a fact. If music exposure didn’t happen over the internet, I doubt bands like OK-GO would have “made it”.
If you subscribe to the notion that killing file-sharing will somehow “save” the music business, then you subscribe to the notion that four large corporations should have the right to dictate 100% of the market place unconditionally and that competition in any market place should be abolished. Put it in another way, the big corporations should be able to control what you can enjoy. How many people believe that? Apparently, Bono seems to think so.
Trying to filter out p2p traffic would reduce the number of tools small businesses would have to survive in an already fragile economy. Some businesses absolutely need a p2p protocol to survive and I think purposely bankrupting small businesses is the last thing a number of economies need right now. I think Canadian record labels saw this or something like this when they found out that CRIA is not representing their interests and the same story is most likely true for a vast majority of independent labels.
Mandating filtering is asking the government to intervene on behalf of abusive large corporations that contribute only to their bottom line.
Advocating a Chinese style government intervention to line the pockets of large corporations tha have abused their monopolistic presence in the market place is extremely dangerous thinking and it’s hard to not dismiss these notions as simply nonsense expescially given that the evidence backs up those who believe that file-sharing represents an opportunity for innovation and creativitiy.
Using China as a model is the worst idea I have ever heard. China uses its Internet filtering for the purpose of heavy-handed censorship, silencing dissent, and other human rights abuses.
i give you the finger bono