U2 Manager Calls for Download Discipline

Longtime U2 manager Paul McGuinness spoke out against a music industry that looks the other way while music is being downloaded illegally, Reuters reported Tuesday. Addressing a MIDEM music conference audience in Cannes, France Monday, McGuinness urged ISPs to adopt disconnection policies to curb illegal downloaders, and government enforcement to make sure it happens.

The problem, he said, lies with record labels that “through lack of foresight and planning allowed a range of industries to arise that let people steal music,” governments that act as a “thieves’ charter,” allowing ISPs to escape responsibility for what passes along their networks, and the technology industry, whose digital devices are virtual “burglary kits.”

As a result of this intricate placement of systems, McGuinness said, it is very easy for the average internet user to get around buying music by downloading illegally copied music files. “There's a lot of money in the music business, but it has stopped coming to the artists,” he said. He compared it to a hypothetical stolen-car trade, wherein stolen cars are advertised in magazines and sold by dealers, all of whom avoid responsibility for the crime they are involved in.

“That's no different to an ISP, but they say they can't do anything about it,” he said. “If you steal a laptop from a store or don't pay for your broadband service, you'll soon be cut off and nicked.”

ISPs should have the same cut-off policy for downloaders, he said, snubbing them before they can further damage the music trade. McGuinness also called on ISPs to share the considerable revenues they gain from music downloads, aiming some of the cash flow toward the artists.

As honorable a cause as stopping illegal downloading is, I think McGuinness is looking at the wrong people. ISPs provide access to the entire Internet, not just to music download sites – that is a lot of pipeline to monitor for illegal files, and the practicality of NetZero or Earthlink watching where everyone on their network goes 24 hours a day is almost ridiculous, not to mention big-brother scary. Furthermore, I don’t need a business degree to predict that ISPs wouldn’t so ardently enforce a policy that cuts off such a huge chunk of their client base: downloading is pretty damn popular.

The thorn in the music biz’s side, I think, is more likely the peer-to-peer download services themselves – there are about 40 million of them, all of whom sit behind a tiny disclaimer on their site that shrugs off responsibility for what their users download. Here’s a metaphor: why arrest the doorman when the dealer is inside the club?

As for the stolen car analogy, here’s where I play devil’s advocate on a grand scale and say that stealing something is different from making a copy of something. No one is walking into a record store and stealing a CD, and whatever lawyer wrote that line should get laughed out of the courthouse. What’s happening is someone is allowing somebody else to make a copy of a CD, thereby relieving them of the burden (read: duty) of buying it themselves. In other words, the number of pressed, sellable albums is not decreasing, the demand is. Maybe if the industry wants to make something realistic happen, they should come up with some better reasoning first. Hey, let’s have the ISPs do it.