If you want to know what’s going on with the Digital Britain report, forthcoming from Lord Carter as metioned yesterday, it seems that you need to keep reading the Financial Times.
There is talk in today’s piece about a broader broadcaster that would encompass Channel 4 as well as supplying alternative news programmes to the BBC. The FT suggests that this might include Five, although it’s not clear to me why an otherwise private broadcaster would fall under this organisation.
Essentially the report demands that there remain a plurality of voices. It doesn’t believe that C4 is able to provide this – hence the need for a wider operation.
Other areas of the report, as reported by the FT, include a wider role for BBC Worldwide representing other broadcasters’ programming, the creation of an agency to fight internet piracy, “restructuring of digital radio networks and greater flexibility on possible mergers”, a review of competition law as it affects regional press and local radio, an examination of the relationship between independent TV producers and broadcasters, and the fact that 2012 will be our digital transition year (well it will be for TV anyway).
A further piece delves deeper into the internet piracy issue. ISPs would be required to collect data on people who they suspect of downloading films and music. Quite how they’d do this is unclear. This would be yet another burden on ISPs who are also going to be required to retain details of emails sent for a year too. Look to hikes in charges to cover this additional work. And also look to lots of people encrypting their internet traffic so that’s it’s not possible to determine what, exactly, they’re doing online.
There’s also a video you can watch here.
(I’d have embedded it here, but the FT doesn’t seem keen to allow embedding. If you click on the link that says Put FT Video on your site, it takes you through to a page that talks about reprints, syndication and copyright law. While I can see that pieces from the FT command a premium, you might think that extending video to third party sites in an easy fashion might be in their interest.)
Interestingly, today also saw the publication of a report by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. The headline from which is that they claim that 95% of downloaded music is illegal.
It’s not entirely clear how this figure was reached. According to the IFPI report, they collated studies from 16 countries over a four year period to estimate “unauthorised file-sharing at over 40 billion files in 2008” (p22). They then calculated that globally this accounts for 95 per cent of music tracks downloaded.
I’d really like to see some details of this. Because while I’m sure that illegal file-sharing remains high, some significant advances have been made even in the last year. The report itself points out that legal digital downloads in the UK increased by 45% in the first half of 2008. And with Apple now offering DRM free music, and the December launch of Amazon’s MP3 service, that figure is set to increase further.
While I’m sure that the digital gains don’t make up for the physical losses, is all of this attributable to piracy? On the one hand, much of that claimed 95% would not have been purchased if piracy wasn’t an option (cf. claimed losses of pirated software that nobody would ever have bought e.g. Photoshop), and on the other – we need to consider the interest in owning recorded music when there is so much competition for our leisure time. Are sales in recorded music falling because of growth in video games? Or DVDs? Or gym memberships? Or other things that vie for our leisure time.