Illegal Music Downloading

David Morris Excerpts

Tuesday 13th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

I am delighted that this debate is happening today, and I have been told that I must declare an interest. As a former songwriter I remember that when I stood for election in Blackpool South, the local press exposed my misspent youth in the ’80s and asked me, “Can you tell us about your songs?” I said—without wanting to be political, even though we are in the House of Commons—“Let’s just say I wrote some dodgy records in the ’80s, but that’s nothing to do with the Government’s criminal record”—by which I meant, of course, the previous Government.

So, with the bad jokes out of the way, and given that nobody is laughing, let us get on to a serious subject. The purpose of my debate is not to attack any business in the entertainment industry, nor is it to propose draconian new laws. I see this debate as an opportunity to put on the record the important work being done to combat the problem of illegal downloading.

Over the next few years, superfast broadband will give rise to even greater integration between the internet and how we consume media. If we get the issue right now, we can ensure that the film, radio and television industries benefit from the experience of the music industry once they become more popular online.

Before I start setting out the issues as I see them, I want to thank the organisations that have spoken to me about the issues that I am going to raise tonight: the Performing Right Society, Google, Virgin Media, UK Music, the Internet Service Providers Association and the British Recorded Music Industry, known affectionately as the BPI. All of them have forward-looking and determined vision to help resolve the problem and protect all sectors of this important industry.

Many of the organisations have pointed out to me that real leaps forward have been made since May 2010. They have asked me to thank the Minister for the role that he has played in leading that—not least in his work in establishing the Creative Industries Council, which brings together groups with an interest in intellectual property. That new group, which first met in July this year, is part of a wider dialogue, led by the Government, to work to resolve the problems that we now face.

Let me take a moment to set out the issues as I see them. We should cast our minds back to the time when MP3s exploded into public consciousness in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Suddenly everyone was talking about a website called Napster. The music industry was left shell-shocked as huge numbers of songs were swamped by hundreds of thousands—perhaps even millions—of users. At that time the problem was that the industry was years away from developing an alternative legal way to access music online. My personal view is that most Napster users were not criminals who wanted to engage in illegal downloading and piracy; most were young people whose only aim was to create music collections on their computers. In the absence of a legal method of doing that, they turned to an illegal one.

[Mike Weatherley (Hove) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. Does he agree that there are three prongs to the protection of our creative industries? There is the carrot, which may be changing some business models to encourage people to download legally, perhaps through differential pricing. There is the stick, which would make illegal the activities of internet service providers and individual users who persistently download illegally, and address the problem of companies, such as Google, that advertise illegal sites. There is also education. People need to understand that if they continually download, that could seriously harm future creative industry output.

[David Morris]

I thank my hon. Friend for that information, and for the educational measures that he has introduced through his “Rock the House” campaign, which is gaining support across the nation and making Members of Parliament engage with the youth of today.

Today websites such as Spotify give a legal alternative to illegal downloading, but how do we ensure that people go to those sites rather than illegal ones? That raises serious questions and problems.

[Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)]

The hon. Gentleman was understanding about the fact that most young people who initially indulged in the activity were not criminals. However, does he believe that the fact that the BPI has from time to time acted in such a heavy-handed way with young people—sometimes even with their families, who had almost no connection with the downloading—has somewhat undermined its public support for very real concerns?

[David Morris]

I thank my hon. Friend for that comment. The BPI’s response may have been knee-jerk at the time, but as I have tried to set out, no real legal alternative is coming through quickly enough.

Search engines are understandably full of illegal sites. That is not the fault of the search engine providers; their spiders trawl the internet and automatically add new sites. Most of us in the House have already experienced that, because our websites are largely ignored until, after a few weeks or months, automated systems at the search engine level find them. Suddenly people start to visit our sites, so those sites are added to search engines without anyone at the search engine ever having looked at them in the first place.

Everyone accepts that creating search engines by any method other than automation is more or less impossible. That means that we then have to ask search engines to remove pages that sell or trade in illegal material. Google allows anyone who has had their copyright infringed to send it up to 10,000 pages a day to be removed. Groups such as the PRS regularly use this service, and say that Google has removed offending pages within four hours. That in itself—I can say in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Mike Weatherley)—is a step in the right direction by the PRS. The service is pretty impressive given the number of pages that have been removed, but it is also laborious for both parties. There is no obvious way to streamline the process, although I understand that discussions are now ongoing. And while the page is on the search engines it is very hard to know the difference between legitimate and illegitimate sites. Seventy-five per cent. of consumers admit to being confused.

Clearly, better education of young people is needed. I am chairman of the all-party group on media literacy. The aim of media literacy is to go into schools and teach young people how to function in this modern-day media environment, where claims made by advertisers and websites may be false. A group called Media Smart goes into schools with that aim and does a marvellous job, the BPI has a scheme called the Music Matters badge to educate consumers, and there are other schemes. However, a full programme on media literacy has not been rolled out, and is we must address that, as the internet is now so integral to modern life. The PRS suggests that we initiate a traffic light system whereby pages are rated green or red depending on whether they are legitimate. That scheme has some merit and could be considered at an industry level.

However, the fear shared across the industry is that legitimate sites will be wrongly accused of being illegal, so that perfectly legal sites are taken off search engines. Flagging sites as red could even open up search engines to legal action. We need to strike a balance between protecting search engines from this litigation and ensuring that they are not cavalier about taking down sites with no evidence. We must target sites that are built only to trade in unlawfully obtained music and are repeat high-volume offenders. The Internet Service Providers Association points out that it is hard to make companies the judge and the jury, as they may not have the expertise to arbitrate on such matters.

We must also ensure that advertisers do not place adverts on websites that trade in illegal content. All too often the offending sites are given an air of legitimacy by syndicated adverts from mainstream companies. Again, this is hard to combat, but advertisers must continue in this work. The Digital Economy Act 2010 empowers Ofcom to force internet service providers to reduce speeds for persistent offenders, and it may even suspend their accounts for short periods. Failure to comply with Ofcom leaves ISPs open to a fine of up to £250,000. The key point is that no one is expecting vast swathes of people to fall foul of these threats to reduce speeds or suspend accounts. Those are a last resort for use against those who refuse to use legitimate sites, the take-up of which is now growing. Through all those means—the development of legitimate sites, the action of search engines to remove illegitimate ones, and a limited threat of action for those breaking the law—we can start to build an environment in which people are encouraged to do the right thing.

The wider issue is the role played by free content. When I was in the music industry the country was awash with free content. Free-to-air television programmes such as “Top of the Pops” promoted artists but also allowed consumers to listen to music free. Much to the amusement of my colleagues, YouTube still has footage of me with a big mullet on “Top of the Pops” in the 1980s. Similarly, radio has offered free content for many years. Today “The X Factor” has developed into a free-to-air business model that relies on phone voting revenue in addition to advertising.

Allowing limited free content is the right thing to do because it promotes artists. YouTube does that very well because people can watch the music video, along with adverts, but it is not easy to download that video or record music from it. It is not impossible to record off YouTube, but the website itself does not offer that option. That again nudges people into doing the right thing. Watching a music video on YouTube generally ensures that artists and labels are paid properly for their work. YouTube is listed along with hundreds of other legitimate sites on Pro-Music. That project is an effort by the industry to help consumers to make the right choices, and I hope that more people will log on to the site. It does not promote any one site, but it helps to ensure that consumers can make the right choices.

The music industry, search engines and ISPs were taken by surprise by the download phenomenon. As my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) said, knee-jerk reactions occurred, but companies are now coming together to help people make better choices. I do not believe that we will ever stop illegal downloading completely—after all, in my day some people were determined to tape songs off the radio and “Top of the Pops”. Dare I say it, I can remember doing that myself in my teenage years.

[Chris Heaton-Harris (Daventry) (Con)]

Lock him up.

[David Morris]

I know. However, I firmly believe that most people will act legally if they can.

I finish by congratulating the Government and the industry on working to reduce the problem. With everyone committed to getting this right, the problems of the past will soon be forgotten. Let us remember that we are world leaders in the music and entertainment industry, and our brands and artists have dominated the world for the past 50 years. The internet raises issues, but as we address those issues we make the business stronger. Finally, may I say how proud I am to have a music industry background, and put on record how much that industry contributes to our economy here in Great Britain?