Sword of justice looks more like a cutlass

THIS has certainly been the British Phonographic Industry’s week for weasel words and futile deeds.

Oh good old BPI, truffling out internet thieves and ensuring hardworking artists get their due. However, the first sign that this may not be a straightforward battle between the forces of light and darkness comes from the BPI’s reluctance to take the matter to court. Could it be that a judge might take a different view? He might, for instance, be persuaded by the considerable evidence that file-sharing does not deprive artists of royalties but actually stimulates the musicians’ sales. The judge may even be old enough to recall a time when Franz Ferdinand was still an archduke and Madonna still American: a time in the 1980s when the music industry created a similar hullabaloo over home-taping, campaigning under the portentous strap line "Home-taping is Killing Music."

Of course it wasn’t killing music. Apparently, that was the job of A Flock Of Seagulls. Instead fans taped their albums for the car, or made up Nick Hornby-style compilation tapes for our friends, who in turn went out and bought the original LPs at HMV. The difference is that while these fans used to spend ages fiddling with recording levels, modern downloaders can acquire their songs with a click of a mouse. For all the allure of illegal downloads, most users would prefer the security of controlled downloads that do not leave you exposed to iffy sound quality, viruses and hackers. However, the legitimate sites charge their British users significantly more for music than anywhere else in the world. They also try to restrict use - roughly the equivalent of selling someone a CD then limiting them to certain CD players and not allowing them to make a back-up copy.

Unlike CDs, legitimate sites like ITunes and Napster don’t offer liner notes, quality graphics or DVD attachments. Essentially then, the music lover is being asked to pay for a service which offers nothing more - and, in some areas, rather less - than the peer-to-peer swaps.

I suspect most music fans would be happy to pay a reasonable price in order to own the music they love, and play it any time and any place they want to. But the music industry insists that it, and not the artists or the fans, owns the music and that listeners can only license it for limited use via proprietary technology. Their mulish refusal to offer unrestricted, downloadable music files at a reasonable price on legal online music sites means people will continue to be seduced by ‘evil’ illegal file-sharing because the devil really does have the best tunes.

The latest events show that the BPI has opted to alienate core consumers with threats and punishments, whilst unconvincingly posing as a caped crusader for the rights of the performing artist. The 23 internet users pursued this week have agreed to pay fines averaging 2,000 per person. Will these payments be redistributed to the artists that the BPI is supposedly supporting? The BPI doesn’t say. It would be cynical to suggest that the record industry is banging on about deprived artists because complaining about their own corporate profits would not generate as much sympathy.

Still, if the BPI is minded to impose draconian penalties on those who distribute music without paying royalties, what sort of action might they consider against someone who deprives an artist of, say, a quarter of a million pounds? Cher and the Sonny Bono estate are pursuing their record label for breaching their contract to the tune of $250,000. Isn’t failing to pay an artist their due rather like stealing their music off the internet?