Brian May, Pete Townsend, Elton John and Others Attack Google Over Piracy

[engine]

Brian May, Pete Townsend, Elton John and Others Attack Google Over Piracy [telegraph.co.uk]

Pete Townshend of The Who and Brian May of Queen today lead a group of rock and pop stars in a public attack on internet search engines like Google for helping users get access to pirate copies of their music.

Search engines must “play their part in protecting consumers and creators from illegal sites,” the signatories say, adding that broadband companies and online advertisers must also do more to prevent piracy.

The stars’ letter points out that the London Olympics will put new global attention on Britain’s creative industries, and argues that the country is well-placed to increase its exports from the music industry.

[Gibble]

Wow, a little late to the party aren't we?

[graeme_p]

Why do *consumers* need protecting from illegal sites? It is copyright holders who benefit, and they should try to make an honest case for why the benefits outweigh the costs.

Big media and big stars want measures that will benefit them, but which will be too expensive and inaccessible for the rest of us (stronger copyright laws have not exactly eliminated scrapers, have they?), and will impose huge costs.

I also found that my recent experience of being plagiarised by an apparently respectable author and a big name publisher is common.

These people's message is "give us more money".

[incrediBILL]

It is copyright holders who benefit, and they should try to make an honest case for why the benefits outweigh the costs.

Why should they make an 'honest' case?

THEY did nothing wrong, it's the pirates that are dishonest.

Maybe they should just stop producing music altogether.

That would teach people a lesson.

Funny how any other worker in the world gets bent out of shape if they aren't compensated accordingly for their work but people think entertainment media is different.

No, it isn't.

You don't deserve free entertainment unless the creator gives it away or it's on a free broadcast medium. Free broadcast radio and TV started this entitlement mentality and I remember people used to (and still do) steal cable TV using the same lame arguments pirates use about stealing files.

Now queue up the lame arguments that infringement isn't stealing so we can ride that idiotic broken moral compass carousel again. Crooks are crooks no matter what kind of infringement candy coating they wear.

"If we can't afford it stealing it shouldn't be a crime because it's just a 'copy'"

Rationalization of the infringement insane.

[lucy24]

any other worker in the world gets bent out of shape if they aren't compensated accordingly for their work

Yup. Do the work, get paid for the work. Your surgeon doesn't get rake in a supplementary commission every time your heart beats. Your website designer doesn't get a royalty every time someone visits the site. Do the work, get paid for the work.

[incrediBILL]

Your website designer doesn't get a royalty every time someone visits the site.

I've had equity deals where I did get a percentage of the site so that's not entirely true. Even so, a website designer does have a copyright on that work, or parts of it, unless the client purchases exclusive rights to the design so in theory you can reuse it for multiple clients.

What would you think if the client gave away your design to other website owners?

You get paid once, hundreds, thousands or millions run your site.

Your surgeon doesn't get rake in a supplementary commission every time your heart beats.

They do get paid for all the additional office visits until it stops beating again. a royalty of sorts.

Besides, you're mixing metaphors.

If a musician sells YOU a song, he gets paid once and you can play it forever. Paid by you once for your license to listen that job/performance. That doesn't give joe, jim, bob, fred, etc. the right to have a copy they didn't pay for because they didn't pay for the job. They're free to listen to it on the radio all they want, assuming it's on the radio, or YouTube perhaps, but if they want a personal copy for on demand performances they need to pay for it.

FWIW, I'm a big fan of pay-per-track music. I have thousands of DRM free paid tracks. Pay-per-album, the old way for Vinyl and CD, to pay high prices for a bunch of stuff I really didn't want just to get tracks not released on singles back in the day was brutal, hated it. The current system is fantastic if it wasn't for the pirates trying to screw it up for the rest of us.

BTW, if you want a free movie I have one of someone stealing my daughters bike off her back porch on the 4th of July, from inside her fenced in and locked yard, posted on YouTube. You can see the guy plain as day and I'll bet, now that he's been caught and seeing some inside of the local jail, that he'd BEG only to lose his internet access vs. what he's going through at the moment. Pirate that video all you want, it's free, the bike wasn't :)

[ronin]

Media Piracy - rather like human conflict - will not end when people beg for it, plead for it, appeal for it or clamour for it, but when the alternative pays better.

[adder]

It is copyright holders who benefit, and they should try to make an honest case

They don't benefit. It's the money they have honestly earned by writing the music and performing. For you it's entertainment, for them it's hard work and at the end of the day they want to take their wage home just like you and me.

If you've ever been in full-time employment, imagine the accountant telling you on the payday: "Sorry, Graeme, you only get half the salary this month because some pirates raided the office last night and nicked some of the money" You'd go beserk! Nevertheless, for some strange, strange reason everyone thinks that it's ok to steal from musicians and actors. It's not ok. It's just like shoplifting. There's no difference between shoplifting and downloading illegal music! You want something, you pay for it.

The only way we can fight with this situation is to introduce stringent regulations for ISPs and Search Engines. For an ISP it's very easy to detect people downloading illegal music. Simply report them to the police and deal done. Similarly, for the search engines, simply drop the pirate sites from your index. It's easy!

[bhonda]

I do agree with you. But, I still think this latest action is chasing the wrong people.

"Sorry, Graeme, you only get half the salary this month because some pirates raided the office last night and nicked some of the money"

This action of 'attacking Google, etc' is the equivalent of taking the above situation, and saying that we should put pressure on the train company, because the pirates happened to arrive at the office on the train. So yes, technically, if the train company had stopped the pirates getting to where they were going, they wouldn't have stolen anything. But unless the train company was actively encouraging pirates to hop aboard and go stealing, I don't think they did anything wrong, and therefore shouldn't be told they have to do anything about it. Maybe they could carry out a Pirate Awareness programme, so all their conductors are trained in how to spot a pirate (big hat, eye patch, parrot, etc) so they can report them to the authorities - but they should not be forced to do so, at their own expense. Don't make them the bad guys. Surely it's more important for all this time and effort to be spent on actually stopping the pirates pirating in the first place? That's a job for the governments and authorities. Yes, maybe they need to work with the search engines and ISPs to get this job done. But it sometimes appears as though Google and ISPs are made out to be as bad as the pirates in the first place.

I wonder whether a better idea would be to actually inform us public what the law says about this. Having a message come from the police saying 'If you do this, then that's illegal, and the penalty for that is this.' Rather than musicians who, although they are very talented, obviously have a vested interest in it.

[crobb305]

I saw a BBC Newsnight story last week about Google's piracy problem. They give some excellent examples of legitimate-site suppression, a problem many of us are experiencing post-Penguin and post-Panda. [bbc.co.uk...]

[Gibble]

Trying to sue Google here is like suing the Yellow Pages because they had the address to a music store where the music was stolen.

[incrediBILL]

Trying to sue Google here is like suing the Yellow Pages because they had the address to a music store where the music was stolen.

Fair point but even the Yellow Pages removes/declines ads from certain businesses.

I plead a similar case to Google a few years back to stop serving up results to queries such as "Powered by vBulletin Version 3.6.12" because I found scripts that hackers were using to locate sites with vulnerabilities via Google, Bing and Yahoo. Google was leading hackers directly to the place to hack, would be like the phone book pointing out homes easiest to rob. If Google didn't respond to those "Powered by" searches then the hackers, just like would be pirates, wouldn't be able to find the sites to hack so easily.

I think there's some culpability here IMO because too much information can easily be a bad thing, not everything needs to be indexed.

[jcoronella]

// retracted. WTF.. sorry

[AG4Life]

Declining music revenue has mostly to do with the transition from CD albums to digital singles. CD albums used to account for 90-95% of the industry's revenue base, but people (well, Apple and other digital stores) figured out a way to stop consumers from getting ripped off when they're forced to buy an entire album when all they want is a song, and the industry's revenue has been declining ever since.

Piracy has contributed to the decline, but I would say in the grand scheme of things, it's actually quite insignificant.

Source: [articles.businessinsider.com...]

[fom2001uk]

When I read Pete Townsend, I read "privacy" not piracy ;-)

[J_RaD]

Declining music revenue has mostly to do with the transition from CD albums to digital singles. CD albums used to account for 90-95% of the industry's revenue base, but people (well, Apple and other digital stores) figured out a way to stop consumers from getting ripped off when they're forced to buy an entire album when all they want is a song, and the industry's revenue has been declining ever since.

Piracy has contributed to the decline, but I would say in the grand scheme of things, it's actually quite insignificant.

*DING*DING*DING*

The only way we can fight with this situation is to introduce stringent regulations for ISPs and Search Engines. For an ISP it's very easy to detect people downloading illegal music. Simply report them to the police and deal done.

so you are a fan of ISPs watching every single bit of traffic coming and going from your computer? na that won't be abused, right?

also keeping your ISP from knowing what you are doing and where you are going isn't that hard.


again..... using pirates as an excuse to pass laws and do things that will only make the ordinary user pay.

Its easy to stand on the soapbox but just remember you'll have to eat your own dog food too.

Similarly, for the search engines, simply drop the pirate sites from your index. It's easy!

yes web censorship is that EASY....... slippery slope?

[incrediBILL]

Watched a couple of episodes of "Through the Wormhole" the other night related to human behavior and the findings of some of these neurologists suggested that any immoral activity was either the results of brain damage or even DNA mutations and could theoretically be fixed with minor electrical stimulation to certain areas of the brain.

What a concept, piracy could be stopped with a 9-volt battery!

Wonder if scraping could be solved this way as well?

I'll bet the threat of full blown electroshock therapy would make people think twice, assuming they were thinking in the first place, about downloading an MP3 from a pirate site :)