Music industry wants ISPs to be its enforcers

Stephen Withers
Friday, 25 January 2008 03:00

Opinion and Analysis

The music industry is barking up the wrong tree when it suggests there is acceptance of the idea of making ISPs responsible for filtering copyright-infringing traffic.

IFPI, the representative body of the international recording industry, has just published its Digital Music Report 2008 . In it, chairman and CEO John Kennedy said "The last year has finally seen the wind of change blowing through old assumptions about the role internet service providers (ISPs) should play in protecting copyrighted content. ISP responsibility is becoming an accepted idea."

Do we accept that private operators of toll roads should put in place measures to detect and block vehicles being used to transport stolen goods? Of course not! If you think that's drawing a long bow, a police officer once told me that when cars are pulled over for daytime freeway or tollway traffic offences, it's not unusual to discover the loot from freshly-committed burglaries.

Do we think services such as FedEx and TNT should systematically look inside the cartons we ship around the country or around the world? No, though we do accept that governments have a right of inspection when those shipments cross borders.

Our relationship with ISPs should be the similar - they charge us for providing the pipes plus basic services such as email accounts and basic web serving. The packets of data we send or receive are be none of their business unless we engage then to provide additional functionality such as spam filtering.

Do I expect ISPs around the world to monitor their customers' traffic in case someone's reading a copy of this article from a site other than iTWire? No, it's my responsibility to watch for violations of my copyright. So why does the music industry expect others to act to protect its interests?

Kennedy gets close to the truth when he observes "Of course, one key reason for this apparent sea-change is the commercial self-interest of ISPs. Unlicensed traffic has always been hogging their bandwidth [SW: customers pay more for greater bandwidth and for larger monthly data quotas, but now ISPs are complaining that their customers are actually using what they've been paying for], but now, as ISPs get further invested into the business of digital content, it poses an increasing danger to their future revenues."

You see how this works against consumers' interests? Instead of sticking to their knitting and delivering connectivity, ISPs are branching out into other areas such as selling music. Buy from your ISP, and the download probably isn't counted towards your monthly quota. Buy from another source, and it is. Assuming you can buy elsewhere - an even more anticompetitive arrangement is for an ISP to buy exclusive rights to particular content and then make it available only to its customers.

There are parallels with the way mobile phone operators have features removed from handsets before they will agree to sell them. One example is preventing a phone from using a normal MP3 or AAC file as a ringtone because the carrier would much rather we bought them over the air instead of creating our own or buying them in bulk on CD or via the web. What we want are full featured phones, but the carriers think their interests are better served by providing crippled devices.

It's probably no coincidence that the companies with interests in mobile phone networks are also large ISPS.

We don't want crippled Internet connectivity. ISP should provide the pipes and stay out of the way. Unauthorised distribution of copyright may be a problem, but it isn't and should not be made the ISPs' problem.