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BPI COMMENT | Internet service providers must partner with the music business to grow our creative economy : 12:2:2008

BPI COMMENT | Internet service providers must partner with the music business to grow our creative economy

BPI Chief Executive Geoff Taylor

The music business wants to partner with internet service providers to create new services that would deliver even greater value for music lovers, artists, labels and ISPs. An internet that rewards creativity, while offering music lovers unprecedented choice and value for money, is in the long term interest of all of us.

We simply want ISPs to advise customers if their account is being used to distribute music illegally, and then, if the advice is ignored, enforce their own terms and conditions about abuse of the account. But despite some agreements in principle, the ISPs refuse to do this on any meaningful scale.

For years, ISPs have built a business on other people’s music. Yet they have paid nothing to the creators of that music, and done little or nothing to address illegal downloading via their networks.

This costs the music business hundreds of millions of pounds a year and will have serious consequences for investment in British culture in the long-term if it is allowed to continue.

We support new ways of selling music legally online. But these services are being stifled by a culture of something for nothing from which big telecoms corporations continue to profit at the expense of the music community.

For well over a year, the BPI has been trying to encourage ISPs to introduce reasonable measures that could remove the need to bring legal action against the 6-million British broadband customers that regularly use peer-to-peer networks to download music unlawfully.

This is the number one issue for the creative industries in the digital age, and the government's willingness to tackle it should be applauded. Now is not the time for ISPs to hide behind bogus privacy arguments, or claim the problem is too complicated or difficult to tackle. It is time they started showing some corporate responsibility and partner with us to allow our digital creative economy to grow.