Copyright Law

UK?s Lord Lucas Compares P2P to Sharing a Newspaper

By soulxtc

In speech to House of Lords notes that many share it with others, and that yet we don’t consider that illegal distribution, and that it’s important the govt allow a “reasonable level of sharing.”

The UK’s Lord Ralph Lucas gave a speech to the House of Lords recently in which he discusses copyright, noting that is a producer of copyrighted material and thus finds the basic protections it affords “extremely important.”

Lord Lucas reminds the body that society’s always allowed citizens to physically share books and music with one another, and that it tread very careful when considering legislation per Digital Britain that may outlaw that practice.

?It is well-known that Newspapers are read by many more people than buy them,” he says. “And certainly, I?m happy to borrow them on buses when they’re left behind. It is entirely reasonable to allow a reasonable level of sharing between friends and within a small community of copyrighted material so it doesn’t have to be purchased again on every incidence it is used.”

He also points out that the whole debate over illegal file-sharing centers around figures for estimated losses and not actual ones. Copyright holders have no evidence that those same people who downloaded content illegally would have otherwise purchased that same content given the opportunity, and that the figures are merely a statistic of the level of copyright infringement that’s occurring.

“Many of the people who are doing this are not in a position to pay for more than they?ve paid for already, so one must be careful in the terminology one uses,” he continues. “And I think we must be careful too about the industry cloaking itself in the finery of the small creative individual. My lords, we are not talking about the small creative individual, here.”

Precisely.

It’s already been pointed out that another of their claims, the often repeated statistic of 7 million file-shares in the UK, is also false, that the actual total could be as low as 3.9 million

The UK music industry’s own economist has also concluded that revenue is up 4.7% since 2007, and a recent poll found that file-sharers spend an average of £75 ($123 USD) on music annually versus £44 ($72 USD) for non-file-sharers.

So much for the warnings that the music industry is collapsing, it’s only changing and record labels have been loathe to adapt, fighting a losing battle against it every step of the way thus far.

More importantly, Lord Lucas says its very important that we be careful in giving private business concerns control over society in a way that will dramatically impact their daily lives.

“We are talking about powerful, monopolistic industries and giving them power over our citizens is something we ought to be careful of.

So true.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

[Hat Tip]

Full post as published by ZeroPaid on December 09, 2009 (boomark / email).