Chairman and Chief Executive, IFPI
Others believe, mistakenly, that the internet will marginalize music companies. But the reality is that the essential functions of a music company are more important in the digital world. New artists need help to cut through the sheer amount of noise in the market. There are more than 2.5m hip hop acts and over 1.8m rock acts on MySpace alone. The music company’s “filtering” role remains vital.
The solution to music piracy lies not just with creative industries, but with the internet’s gatekeepers, the ISPs. ISPs need to take sensible, proportionate measures to help protect creative content online. That is the core of our message to governments. One such measure is the proposed “graduated response” to warn and ultimately impose a sanction on repeat infringers.
Others in the creative content business agree the era of the “free lunch” is well and truly over. Media moguls such as Rupert Murdoch and Barry Diller have changed the tone of the debate by indicating they will charge for content online. Unfortunately, we have not seen a co-operative response from most ISPs.
Fortunately, some governments have grasped the scale of the problem. President Sarkozy of France has set the standard by introducing a graduated response approach to piracy that is now enshrined in legislation. Internet users who repeatedly infringe copyright will be warned about their behavior and their attention drawn to legal sites – if they continue to flout the law they will ultimately face the sanction of account suspension. This should persuade users to migrate to those legal music services being licensed by record labels. There has been good progress elsewhere: in Asia, South Korea and Taiwan have introduced the graduated response approach to tackle piracy. But in Europe the debate has been tougher. The European Commission has so far failed to match noble words with meaningful actions.
In the UK, following the Digital Britain report, the government is proposing to bring forward legislation that would include, as a last resort, the effective sanction of temporary account suspension for those infringers who repeatedly ignore warnings to stop. It has said it is committed to reducing piracy by about 70 per cent within two or three years.
The music industry has proved the pathfinder for creative businesses in the digital age but governments must make the next move. Do they want the internet to be properly regulated and intellectual property rights respected and enforced? Or is the internet to be regarded as beyond the writ of law, with the disastrous implications for the creative economy that that implies?
John Kennedy is Chairman and CEO of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). He has headed record companies internationally and in the UK since the mid-1990s – latterly as President and COO of Universal Music International. He was honored with an OBE from the British government for his leading role in the Band Aid and Live Aid projects.