Illegal Music Downloading

Martin Horwood Excerpts

Tuesday 13th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[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.