Face the music

Wired:Paul McGuinness, U2's softly spoken manager, has been putting the cat among, well, the other cats, actually, with a blistering speech at Midem, the music industry's annual shindig, in Cannes this week, writes  Danny O'Brien.

McGuinness berated internet companies for being so successful, demanding that the phone and tech firms hand over a chunk of their profits to the floundering record business. Why? Because they "have enjoyed a bonanza in the last few years off the back of recorded music content".

McGuinness is right that there's probably a deal that the music industry could cut with internet service providers (ISPs), just as it eventually made a deal with Apple and iTunes. But when you see what McGuinness wants the telecoms companies to do, you can understand why they might balk.

He suggests: throwing internet users offline whenever they are repeatedly accused by a copyright holder of illicit activity; monitoring all internet traffic for signs of suspicious activity; and creating blacklists of websites that the music industry wants vanished from the internet.

McGuinness says it can be done, and has the examples to prove it. "[ One] show of power was Google's acceptance of the Chinese government's censorship conditions," he says.

Is that really the example McGuinness wants to follow - holding the same kind of threat over free communication as the Chinese Communist Party?

The other ISP action that McGuinness cites with approval is US cable company Comcast's underhanded blocking of BitTorrent downloads.

It hasn't done Comcast much good here. The company is currently looking down the wrong end of a federal investigation for interfering with its customers' data.

Meanwhile, the infringers have simply encrypted their communications, while Comcast's trap is left to catch only legitimate BitTorrent users, who use the protocol for downloading legitimate software and services.

You can certainly try to build what McGuinness wants: an internet where customers are spied on by the phone companies they pay; an internet where you can get thrown off for failing to get the right chit for the wrong bits; a tech industry where every new piece of technology or internet protocol that might risk the rightholders' wrath must cower under the fear of a lawsuit.

But as the Chinese have discovered, it won't be as good as what we have - and those poor, beleaguered users who must be guided by McGuinness's perfect moral sense will seek out the more freeflowing internet every time.

McGuinness ends with a heartfelt plea - to "shift the focus of moral pressure away from the individual P2P [ peer-to-peer] file thief", and on to the technologists. He calls on them to share "the skills, ingenuity and entrepreneurship from which our business has a lot to learn". The sad truth is that the technologists have been trying to share their knowledge with the recording industry for more than a decade.

McGuinness boasts of having cut deals with Apple chief executive Steve Jobs, and "done a deal with him face to face in his kitchen in Palo Alto in 2004".

Here's Jobs in 2006, explaining how he finally persuaded the music industry to give iTunes a try: "We got to know these folks [ the record labels] and we made a series of predictions that a lot of things they were trying would fail.

"Then they went and tried them, and they all failed, for the reasons that we had predicted."

Seriously, Paul: phone up Steve and ask him what he predicts about ISP filtering and customer blocking.

He'll tell you what any other technologist will tell you. The illicit filesharers will bypass the filtering and the brickwalls like a knife through butter.

All that will be left of your plans is a more expensive, more fragile internet that will cost users (and media companies) a lot more to use.

You want technologists to tell you their secret of their success? You know it already. When you saw Dublin's Phantom FM as a pirate station, and invested in turning it legit, did you see it as a threat? Or an opportunity? Work the technology Paul, not against it: take advantage of filesharing, not try to stub it out of existence. Listen to the music.