Lloyd-Webber calls for clampdown on ISPs Musical theatre impresario Andrew Lloyd-Webber has railed against ISPs in the House of Lords for profiting from internet piracy, and urged the government to clamp down hard. In a debate on Thursday, Lloyd-Webber claimed the government's proposed regime to discourage illegal file-sharing will not achieve its aim of reducing …
If we follow his train of thought, petrol garages need to do more to prevent vehicle theft. All vehicles use some form of petroleum sold by petrol garages, and many of them are stolen by inscrupulous individuals, therefore petrol garages need to prevent theft.
Huh? Yes, ISPs are "used" on the way to piracy. I still dont see why they should be held responsible though. How about the rightsholders use some of the vast amount of money they make to come up with a solution that is fair to customers but blocks pirates. Or come up with a new business model, like they should have done years ago.
Oh wait, its much easier to put the blame on someone else.
... and I'll say it again.
Prove to me that the "losses" due to online piracy are genuine losses. How can you prove that these people would have bought the genuine article if piracy was not an option? I seriously doubt you can.
Move on and adapt. Like Spotify. People want the perception of free and easy downloads, so give it to them and find a different way of making money. The old concept of paying of a physical product is dead.
The good that can come out of this is that artists get frustrated by their revenue from the "Industry" and may seek alternative options through independent sources. Many are doing this already, and are finding they get a much greater slice of the pie also.
The real pirates are the big studios and labels who rip off the consumer, rip off the artists, and then complain when people try to rip them off.
Musical theatre impresario Andrew Lloyd-Webber has railed against ISPs in the House of Lords for profiting from internet piracy,
Because here is another twat talking bollocks
I dont know anybody who has signed up for internet to download films specifically.
ISP dont profit from piracy it actually causes a strain on their infrastructure. But if they agree to regulate it they then become responsible for the content making them liable,
I would never put myself in that position. Especially if i knew that 90% of the traffic will be almost impossible to stop without Major Disruption to all services and cost millions
Is it that hard for limelight Celeb Smaktards to understand.
If you look at the figures that ERA ( Entertainment Retailers Association) put out. The percentage change in unit sales 2007/2008 for music is down 1.9% to 88m units, however the the retail value is down by 6.9%. Video unit sales 2007/2008 are up 3.8% and retail value is only up 0.1%.
Downloads now account for 96% of singles sales (by volume) and as at December 2008 7% of album sales
So not all bad news for the Entertainment industry, just bad news for the shops that are selling phyiscal units
ISPs don't profit from internet privacy -- they have to carry the traffic, it costs them. They would only be profiting if people subscribed to the ISP for downloading music/etc when they would otherwise not have connected to the Internet -- that would be very few people.
It is however good press to blame your own failing industry on someone else.
I didn't switch from commercial music to piracy, I simply stopped buying new music because of the shocking lack of talent and originality in the industry. I agree wholeheartedly that the film industry will suffer the same fate because they are suffering the same problem. Every second song is a cover or remix and every second film is a remake or adaptation from a comic or book.
Mine's the one with "K.I.G's other song is also a rehashed nursery rhyme" written on the back.
"He could foresee a situation in a decade’s time when there would be virtually no orchestral film work. Illegal downloading would so decimate the film industry that orchestral recording sessions would be a thing of the past. In this connection I was reminded that three of London’s main orchestral recording studios have closed since 2000" - How many top 10s did they have? Nobody cares about classic anymore! Every 12 year old wants the collected works of the masters... Twat!
"My sole objective is to draw noble Lords’ attention to the cataclysmic consequences for all the creative industries if this area remains unregulated." Your sole objective is to earn the ******** from the ******** industry! It already is regulated...Twat.
“the digital economy underpins our whole economy and builds our national competitiveness”. - so we have more people managing bigger networks to download more instead of playing a violin and thinking that they should be paid as much as a heart surgeon.
"No, not when there are no longer shops selling the physical products and when the internet has become a sort of Somalia of unregulated theft and piracy." So ban e-commerce as well?
"But, as we have seen throughout history, and recently in the financial markets, there are dire consequences when people drift down the path of unregulated behaviour." Time for the Clown to start turning us into a Stalinist state and monitoring everything that we do...
What do you mean they do already?
Who's that at the door?
Be right back....................
Why did they pick such an unctious person as their spokesman? Alongside John Birt as well. It's like they want people to rip off the music industry.
Note to music industry: send someone sexier next time.
That point Lloyd Webber makes about delaying investment in faster broadband. Way to win everyone over, nobhead.
well kindly shut up then Mr Lloyd Webber.
The music industry has no-one but itself to blame... SOoooo many tech firms big and small have tried to help them into the 21st century, all to be pushed away by their greed.
Besides, if i download the sound track to 'Phantom of the Opera', doesn't that increase my likelihood to go and spend the 50 quid plus for a theatre ticket....
How about some reasonable attitudes from 'rights holders'.
"Musical theatre impresario Andrew Lloyd-Webber has railed against ISPs in the House of Lords for profiting from internet piracy and urged the government to clamp down hard."
How clueless is that?
What next? Claiming BT are guilty of aiding and abetting because they allow crooks to plan their next blag on the telephone? Claiming the Post Office are profiting from crime because they don't do anything to stop stolen goods from being mailed? Or perhaps he would like to accuse the PO of profiting from terrorism when animal rights nutters send letter bombs?
What a completely and utterly clueless *tit*!
But then what do you expect from a twunt who can see nothing absurd with sitting on a throne while taking part in an abysmal TV talent show.
Suing people is unpopular and expensive but as the copyright holder he's the one responsible for enforcement action. As a non copyright holder I have no interest in my money being used to protect his copyrights, it's his problem not mine.
If he wants me to help pay to protect his copyright then I want unlimited useage rights to the material I'm paying to protect. Fair is fair after all! Ok, so I almost feel sorry for any poor bastard forced to listen to (as Rowan Atkinson once put it) "Andrew Lloyd Webber's latest rearrangement of Mendelsohn's Greatest Hits" but that doesn't negate the point. They're his rights, it's up to him to protect them not me.
I work in ALW's field of expertise - musical theatre - and piracy isn't hurting us in the slightest. In fact, it's beneficial to our industry. As people spend less on cinema and recorded music, they are spending more on live music and live theatre.
We do get the occasional pirate recordings of concerts and shows, but if anything they drive more custom; a poorly filmed recording of Phantom of the Opera from a hand-held camera in the wings is never going to be as similar to the real experience as a pirated film is.
Frankly, I don't know what he's complaining about. Of course he gets massive royalties from CDs and DVDs, but with his various TV shows, live shows and new scripts, he's not exactly struggling.
I always thought that ISP's don't like P2P, it consumes a lot of bandwidth, which ultimately the ISP\s have to pay for.
Is the argument that people only join ISP's to download wares, hence ISP's are making revenue on people who otherwise wouldn't be on the internet (obviously they're not there for the other wonderful uses of the internet, Facebook, porn, email, wikipedia and myspace ;)?
I think the logic here is somewhat flawed, much like the argument that someone downloading an album they wouldn't buy is costing the record company money (there is still however a morality argument to be had for sure, and the fact that by downloading from p2p, they are perhaps facilitating someone who may have paid for it to download it that little bit faster). While it's dangerous to make assumptions, and generalisations. I'm sure ISP's would like to not pay for p2p traffic and people pay for internet connections for things other than wares.
Yeah, like they just LOVE having to provide the infrastructure to support all that extra bandwidth!
I think you'll find they'd join you Mr. L.W. in wishing all their customers would just stick to light browsing, some Internet, maybe a bit of web radio...
Can we have a muppet icon please??
"Proposing to legislate to require ISPs merely to write to infringers and leave rights-holders with the near impossible, deeply expensive and hugely unpopular task of suing those who persist is simply not going to produce the required deterrent effect," he said.
Darn right eh Andrew!
Let's just cut to the chase and have them all shot!
OK?
Who'd pirate his music anyway?
People will continue to pirate music one way or the other. Slapping down filesharing will, like the IWF kiddieporn blacklist, simply move people onto other methods and those who are determined to make money from it from selling pirated CDs and DVDs down at the market or car boot will not be put off by any internet restrictions.
Also none of these people ever ask why people pirate and why the music industry has problems.
People will pirate stuff if they feel they are being over charged. This is why companies like Play.com do such a good business because they are cheap. Some people might still think paying 31p per minute for a 46 year old record is "good value" but most people wont.
The other reason the music industry has is that frankly most of its output is shit and often the only good tracks on an album are the ones released as singles. So people wont go out and spend £15 on a CD only to find that its only got a couple of good tracks on it.. they've been burned too often by that now to be taken in.
So people go onto the torrents and they download the CD and find that, yes, most of the album is shit and not worth the money they would have paid for it.
Why is this man getting his panties in a bunch? Surely he isn't suffering financially from illegal file sharing.
I can only assume he has taken this stance to draw attention to himself and his fatuous, inane and sometimes puerile music in the vain hope of getting someone to actually listen to it.
Since when have ISP's logs been proof? P2P systems routinely polute their traffic with bogus entries, precisely to make traceability difficult.
For years I have complained that the media industry has been ripping people off. I complained loudly in HMV a few years ago when my wife bought me a CD of Dark Side of the Moon (I already have it on vinyl). £17 they charged -- SEVENTEEN QUID. Robbing #*%$!
They have milked the public for far too long. Now the bolt-cutters of technology have removed the outer fence, and their goods are freely available for collection. They still haven't worked out an alternative business model, and until they do those supplies are going to be constantly raided.
I've no sympathy. And as for Lloyd-Webber -- if BT made £5bn and the music business made £1bn, well I think he needs to retrain. Get used to it pal; the music business gravey train has just hit the buffers!
[Fascinating how the Internet is churning up society. I wonder what the world will look like in 50 years. And what they think of us.]
I think, where technology is involved, we really must think of the politicians. They are so impressionable. I'm sure Lord Lloyd-Weber is well-meaning, but he's out of touch and indulging himself:
'It is important to remember as well that pirates are bandwidth hogs who reduce the quality of service and raise costs to legal users. Illegal file-sharing spreads viruses and inappropriate, and unexpected, content for minors. There are even dire predictions that the internet will grind to a halt over the next few years. Dealing with piracy removes that threat.'
Saw it on the BBC and there it is in Hansard.
"and leave rights-holders with the near impossible, deeply expensive and hugely unpopular task of suing those who persist is simply not going to produce the required deterrent effect"
...er... it's copyright, you tosspot - that's how it works. Just because you a) can't find anyone to sue for downloading your music but b) feel like you should be doing something, doesn't mean that the government has any right to step in to do it for you.
Go back to Royston Vasey!
It's hard to beat free, right?
Make it convenient, cheap and DRM free.
Oh look, people who previously chose to download things becuase they couldn't find them for sale online/had to wait for a DVD with tat attached to be produced/didn't want to buy an online vid that expires after a certain amount of time/didn't want to buy a physical media implementation becuase shit gets broken suddenly start buying stuff.
I've not bought a load of EA games becuase I don't like shitty DRM, buy games from Steam all the time.
Let HMV.co.uk or whatever sell DVDs/Games/Whatever direct to people and you'll make money. Instant gratification encourages impulse purchasing.
Why should ISPs have to do the policing? They're just an easy target for the neanderthal record industry. Would they ask blank CD manufacturers to block the use of CDs for filesahring? Would they expect the Royal Mail to inspect every postal packet for copyright infringing CDs, MDs, cassettes, etc.?
... of just how broken the music biz's business model is, a few minutes on Amazon UK will demonstrate perfectly how stupid things have become.
When Amazon's CD costs £10, their download version about £8, yet you can buy the CD (new, and often imported from the US) from a marketplace seller for about £4, who's going to buy the download? Or Amazon's CD either.
Most of the time you can get the physical product, with uncompressed audio for less than Amazon's MP3s or iTunes's AACs. The only way to get people to use legal download services is to either price things right (eMusic) or make things seriously easy to use for casual purchases (iTunes, now they've dumped the DRM).
Oh, and Mr Noise-Wibbler should try to buy anything half-way decent music-wise (should he be capable of recognising it, which I seriously doubt...) without the internet. When was the last time you went into a record shop and could actually find any records worth buying? No range, because the shop's full of DVDs and video games, and ludicrous pricing. In our local Zavvi's closing down sale, they were still charging more than Amazon. Pathetic.
The solution is simple, really. Make music that people want to buy available for purchase at a sensible and fair price, instead of making crap, deleting stuff or charging silly money.
Here we go again, another multi-millionare still not getting enough and it's sombody elses
fault Waaaaaaaaahhhh!!! Waaaaggghhhh it's all the ISPs fault, they are not protecting interests
Gary Rhodes is closing his Dublin restaurant, Antony Worrall Thompson has had to put his company into administration, making 60 staff redundant, Gordon Ramsay is closing one of his restaurants, Paul Rankin has closed his only restaurant in Ireland as well. And there are many more restaurants that have closed that nobody ever hears about because hey are not owned by somebody famous.
However, has anyone heard one of these celebrity chefs complain that home cooking is destroying the restaurant industry? No, because that have a brain and they realise that it is the ECONOMY that’s causing the downturn in business. The copyright mafia need to Adapt or Die, hopefully they will die, and they won’t be missed.
Has Mr inside-out face had his head stuck up his own arse for past couple of years, there's a recewssion you pillock, that's why nobody is buying your music. PS, its a bit crap anyway
It's all a matter of perspectives. Lloyd Webber is miffed because he earns royalties from so many artists - he's earning from artists as diverse as Deep Purple, Elvis Presley not to mention his own work's extensive discography
If the music industry invested in staying ahead of the technology then there would be no problem. But the fact is that the product has not changed at all in living memory. It may be distributed on a different medium - but in essence, it's the same old 2 track Stereo audio. The movie industry uses sound technologies that are streets ahead of the music industry.
Indeed the software industry and game industry (also media providers just like the music industry) keep on evolving their products - to build up an excitement.
There may be excitement when the next big band comes out - but at the end of the day they are not really doing anything different.
To me, in the modern world, an Album is merely an advertisment for a musical artists. I will pay top dollar to go and see me favourite artists live. Indeed, I would identify a west end musical as good value for money for people who want to go.
The music industry should be capitalising on the back of the fact there are millions of people downloading music adverts for theire artists everyday. If they gave away the music and weren't so precious about trying to charge people money for listening to the antiquated 2 track technology then they would notice that they could be raking it in from all the other mediums presented.
But instead, they get there dinosaurs to come up with a policy that counters everything the information age is all about.
If the music industry thinks that today's generation are just going to start paying for albums - they are mistaken in most cases.
I am a music lover - in a pre-internet world my income dictated that I could may be an album every other month. There is too much else to spend your money on these days- and on that basis, the music industry will not increase it's revenue no matter what draconian measures are taken. I'll just play more games, or watch more movies - or listen to the countless unsigned artists on the internet that are ignored by the music industry and give away their music anyway in a effort to get noticed.
And here's the rub - they don't bloody deserve to be in business anyway. I was in a commercial band in London - and I can confirm first hand that Hunter S Thompson's famous quote still rings true: "The music business is a cruel and shallow money pit, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs".
Trust Andrew Lloyd-Webber to make a song and dance about it; let's just be thankful he isn't putting it on the West End and charging us for the 'pleasure' - yet.
On a more serious note, how does the creator of shite musicals manage to get a seat in the House of Lords - he must have made some serious donations.
actually you hit it right on the head
last CD I bought by my favorite artist had 1 good song and 12 I couldn't even get through one listen of and the CD cost $17. His next album that came out I checked the songs the artist had released on his site was like wow their good, than I read a review of the album, turns out the songs that I felt were good and worth me purchasing it weren't even on the damn CD. So I went got a rip of the full CD the songs on the CD were absolute shit and I didn't even listen to any one of them for more than 20 seconds and deleted them cause they were a waste of space.
Honestly if they want to charge outrageous prices for stuff at least make the stuff semi worth it.
Same goes with movies last movie I paid to see was Transformers. I felt like I paid $18 to see a 2 hour commercial for Pepsico, Ford, Ebay, and Nokia. Sad part is there has been nothing released in years I felt even worth wasting my bandwidth downloading let alone spend money on to see. Hell I can wait till its on DVD 4 months after its in theaters and rent it for $1 and usually then I don't even feel most movies are worth it.
To the studios and record companies heres how to stop copyright infringement: Release a product that is worth something. Most "music" (and I use the term loosely) that you produce makes listening to nails on a chalkboard sound like a Beethoven symphony. And to the movie producers the trailers for the damn movies are usually better than the movies themselves, which somehow never have those excellent scenes shown in the trailer in them.
I can honestly say that I have bought far more music from iTunes than I ever would have if it wasn't available.
New model : I hear a song, I like a song i splash out the 99p to buy the song. If I'm watching a TV program and they have some music on I like but don't recognise, I "Shazam" it and then maybe watch the you tube video (if it hasnt been pulled to "protect" the rights holder) and then I splash out the 99p to buy it.
Old model, I hear a song and wonder if the other 9 or 10 on the album are going to be any good, good enough to justify buying an album, figure that nah, probably 1 or two good songs and 8 to 10 filler tracks so I dont buy anything
No-one, I suspect, begrudges artists a return on their work - but most of us begrudge them the right to become filthy rich with little or no effort. Most piracy is caused by corporate greed. There's always a price below which piracy becomes uneconomic - but that may be too low to keep media and industry figures in Rolls Royces, country homes and trophy wives.
Come down off your high horse Mr Webber - this isn't about protecting intellectual rights, it's about protecting your already overflowing wallet. If you really believed in intellectual rights, you'd be paying a fortune for your derivative music - music which I for one wouldn't download if it was legally free.
The internet is here to stay. If the media industry can't get its act together and come up with viable new business models - models that perhaps won't any longer support outrageous profits - then like scribing monks and hand weavers it's destined to disappear.
But whatever the answer, a media industry waging war on what ought to be its own customer base is an insupportable and intellectually bankrupt response.
Lloyd Webber is a dinosaur.
The recording industry only ever existed in the first place because they had access to a technology that, at the time, was not available to all. All that changed forever in 1995 with the advent of the CD-R, and the old recording industry is now unsustainable. Just like you can't sustain an industry around the business model of fitting paraffin lamps to horse-drawn carts. The makers of horse-drawn carts probably campaigned against the motor car, and the makers of paraffin lamps almost certainly campaigned against electrification, but it didn't help them and it won't help these dinosaurs.
Frankly, I don't give a flying one if the industry does go tits up. It's all boy bands, girl bands, effing/blinding/glorifying violence and former minimum-wage slaves from towns you've never heard of who "won" rigged TV talent shows anyway. What's left will be all about the music, not the money.
...are our elected leaders even wasting our time and money looking at ways to screw us over?
'the government's proposed regime to discourage illegal file-sharing will not achieve its aim of reducing such activity by 70 per cent by 2012'
Is Gordon Brown trying to be a 21st century Canute? (Olde English v. being, I believe, the strangely appropriate Cnut...)
Tougher laws aimed at pirate bay have just led to the availability of p2p vpn tunelling.
Why is that purveyor of blue-rinse balladeering even given a job in the lords?
It's always the long-established, vested-interest types who whinge about the harm being done by p2p, usually the ones with the largest pots of gold. IP laws breed greed and laziness and protect the creatively redundant, they DO NOT engender creativity; that happens naturally in hungry noobs.
So Lloyd-Webber complains about file sharing but has no ideas of his own of how to move the subject forward? What a complete spanner.
He's just prissy because nobody bothers to share the shit he writes, even when it's free. I feel able to make a prediction that if all the world's P2P networks were brought down tomorrow Mr Lloyd-Webber wouldn't see a single extra CD sale.
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