Say your errant son is doing the unlawful & gets caught. He’s using the family computer or at least the family router & account. That account is now blocked meaning no-one in the house may legally use the internet. Basically the innocent will be persecuted for the sins of guilty. Imagine the consequences if students at college use the academic accounts which then get banned or the employee who gets the works account blocked? It’s totally unworkable unless Lord M expects the innocent to accept punishment for the wrongs of others.

A massive part of the benefit for music here is that it’s as much an encounter with a personality as it is an ‘experience good’ – computer games don’t often give you much concrete insight into the mind of the developer. The level of self-expression in game design is pretty abstract, and certainly not linked to the output in the way that the experience of seeing someone perform music, or being moved by the lyrics of a songwriter is…

So in music, DRM has proved, thus far, to be a total FAIL. It hasn’t worked, and is at least partly responsible for the adversarial relationship that we currently have between listeners and labels.

But I guess I just thought it was important to address the practicality of how this stuff plays out – DRM ‘can’ work if within that DRM frame-work there’s enough headroom that people who want stuff in a usable way can get it, and if buying is easier than copying.

I would, however, suggest that torrenting music is an inherently more ethically defendable practice that buying illegally manufactured CDs/DVDs/Games from some dodgy geezer in a market. There you’re just feeding cash into a different corrupt industry. I don’t see many counterfeit goods salesmen displaying their fairtrade badge…

..which would be an interesting angle to take on this – the idea of a fairtrade network of musicians… needs thought and fleshing out.. maybe I’ll start a thread about it over at solobasssteve.com for discussion

My point was, the digital genie is out of the bottle – mp3s (or wavs, or your preferred poison) are inherently copiable, and now the fundamental medium of non-physical recorded music reproduction. If you can’t limit the medium to prevent reproduction (how do you send copies of iPhone apps to your friends? How do you copy a PS3 game? I’m sure it’s possible but copying an mp3 is a lot easier), then you inevitably have to punish reproduction. In doing so, you tie up *so* many resources in monitoring and break *so* many freedoms.

I think the anonymous poster has totally missed the point – the tech argument is totally separate. He presumably would have argued against the Manhattan Project on the basis that “It’ll never work”.

So it’s not a triumph of technology over desire, but it is a triumph of environment over the need to ‘break the system’ that often drives the ‘everything has to be free’ crowd. The DRM on an iPhone only really becomes apparent if you’re writing an app and are waiting to have it ‘approved’, or want an app that doesn’t exist and can’t find someone to write it for you… It’s most apparent, I guess, in the limited way that the web-browser incorporates flash/java, because obviously, as soon as people can write java apps for the iPhone that run in the browser, the app store becomes only one of two ways of getting apps on there without jailbreaking your phone…

But thanks so much for bringing up the point about pricing models – the app store is a massive triumph of market-driven pricing, it seems – so many great apps are only 99p because the people selling them think they’ll sell more that way, and 1,000,000 x 99p is much more than 2,000 x £15… All really good food for thought, thanks.

One small point – you mention the iPhone App Store as a triumph for DRM. This is only true up to a point – iPhone apps are actually pirated on a fairly massive scale, as once you “jailbreak” an iPhone, it is fairly trivial to install an App Store app purchased by someone else without paying for it. (I speak as an App Store developer, rather than a pirate!)

That said, what Apple have done is to make that approach far less appealing by the combination of ease of use and low prices for the legitimate path – yes, I could jailbreak my phone, go and find an illegal copy of this app I want, and jump through all the hoops to get it – or I could just pay the three quid on my credit card and have it immediately with no hassle at all. Given the above, I am quite surprised that anyone even bothers with pirated content from App Store, but I think that just proves the point that there are people out there who simply won’t ever pay for software / music / films, and it is pointless trying to make them do so – which is one of the many points that the record companies and their puppet Mandy simply don’t get.

2. Not *just* metadata, but the point is, it will lead to the obfuscation of metadata by people who don’t want to be easily detected. Ergo, useful metadata currently there will no longer be there. Whatever other methods they use don’t change this. The main point is that at the moment that data is useful, valuable, and a bit of creative thinking can work wonders in relation to it (not least of all indie artists panicking about file sharing discovering that no-one is swapping their files – something that will happen rather a lot…)

3. Who said anything about complete metadata? useful metadata is there. I use it to find out whose been listening to my music. Every article you read about the music industry and the horrible situation its in sites data about the numbers of albums/singles/whatever relating to particular bands that are being download – those stats rely on that data.

You don’t have to concede anything – if you have info/research/links to make the discussion more complete, that help us all to know more about this, please post them – but please do so with some kind of identifier. Conversations work much better with context.

Should I talk to Mandelson, I’ll sound like someone who thinks his plans won’t work. Along with millions upon millions of other people. You seem to have assumed a level of totality in my reasons for this being a bad idea that isn’t there. There are myriad other reasons, that other people will no doubt take to Mandy who know more about them than I. I’m not here to face the nonsense of his plans alone.

1. iPlayer does not use P2P. Hasn’t done so for about 2 years now. Very unlikely to switch back to classic P2P protocols – they’re not efficient enough.

2. Detection will *not* be based on metadata alone. Do a little research.

3. You don’t have access to complete “metadata” at present – but I conceded you may have acccess to some.

That said, the Geffen/Allen/Mandleson plan is flawed, but not for the reasons you state. Quite simply the tech is not up to the job. The power requirements for a start are huge. Should you talk with Mandleson, you’ll sound like a ranting geeky muso. Try taking a different tack.

So yes, reputation and free works to some extent.

I do hope that this Mandelson model does not become EU-wide, though I can see how it will. A lot of my peers here in Finland are asking “where’s me moni” -type of questions. The odd thing is that many of those musicians have not put a large body of their own work to be pirated anyhow, so they are more concerned about “opportunity” losses than anything else. They might not be ready to imagine the long road it seems to be to get to have a firm human-to-human network of fans.

This fan thing is different in most genres. I’m a great fan of Wayne Krantz and would buy his stuff, for many reasons. The big names (in the Finnish music scene) I’ve played don’t have that sort of following, they are stars with no compositions of their own – and they use other peoples tunes for their records. And their listeners are fickle, they are not fans of the body of work of an musician but more the casual listener-type. For my songwriting peers here this means that they want their cash now, because if a star doesn’t boom she’ll bust… So they want copyright to be strictly enforced and firmly in place, nevermind that many have been really been cheated by record companies. But still the money from radio play and tv is important, for some. Most, like me, get only little (yes I get some every year) – I haven’t managed to write a hit

I don’t have a recollection of ordinary people ever buying shitloads of records without massive prior listening. Broadcast radio was and still is the discovery mechanism here – and radio was free for the end consumer all along.

As you can see, I’m more inclined to follow this free thing. Sowing your seeds to the wind, so to speak. The “compensation of musicians” discussion that’s always been ongoing will continue in perpetuity. I remember not a few years ago when these peers of mine were all talking how record companies were shitting them left and right…