Piracy - right or wrong?

The pirates have been caught and sentenced, pending appeal naturally. We're not talking about the seafaring pirates off Somalia though. This time it's a bunch of Swedes involved in the act of piracy. According to Wikipedia "Piracy is a war-like act committed by a nonstate actor, especially robbery or criminal violence committed at sea, on a river, or sometimes on shore". Well sorry guys but if you're going to get involved in illegal file sharing and hope to get away with it then perhaps you should have chosen a less incriminating name?

The “Pirate Bay” founders have been sentenced to a year in jail and a £2.5m fine. The appeal result will be interesting and there is clearly some support from the illegal downloaders who seem to believe that it is their right to download copyright material. Some view it as "sticking it to the man". Although certain downloaders believe that they are only hurting big industry and fat cat artists such as Madonna and Robbie the reality is that the huge majority of composers, performers, music labels and producers are talented artists who are not top of, or concerned with, pop charts.

The majority of people in the music business manage to make a living, certainly not a fortune but enough for it to serve as a career. The rise of illegal downloading has hit smaller musicians and music labels hard. Legitimate sites such as iTunes and eMusic are just as easy to use but the ubiquity of pirate downloading sites means that some feel that if there are so many doing it it must be OK. Of course it isn't and as I said at the beginning the clue is in the name. If you prefer not to be involved with pirates and care about the musicians, big or small, then legitimate CDs or downloads are your fair options.

PRS Again

You can rely on the PRS to let down the music business. With musicians struggling just as much as everyone else in the credit crunch PRS have failed again to see reality.

Their latest failure to engineer a deal with YouTube is regrettable. PRS say they argue the case of the songwriters but once again fail to disclose which artists would be covered by a new deal with YouTube.

One reason that PRS won't disclose who will benefit from a new deal with YouTube is that apart from the PRS fat cats earning £400,000 a year the main beneficiaries will be the multi-millionaire artists whose videos will be most played on YouTube while the smaller musicians will see little.

Unfortunately all PRS will succeed in doing, in their aggressive approach with YouTube, is further drive people to piracy sending them to illegitimate video and music websites.