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At Midem, the bleat goes on - January 28, 2008

Apparently, the near-collapse of the global record industry is all Abbie Hoffman's fault.

"Does anyone remember Abbie Hoffman?" long-time U2 manager Paul McGunniess asked in his Midem keynote Monday. "He was one of the 'Chicago 7' the ‘Yippies” of the Youth International Party who tried to disrupt the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and got beaten up and put on trial by Mayor Daley’s police. He put out a book with the title 'Steal this Book.' I think he has a lot to answer for."

What exactly? For teaching the future tech geeks among the Yippies that it's OK to steal music, too:

It’s interesting to look at the character of the individuals who built the industries that resulted from the arrival of the microprocessor," McGunniess said. "Most of them came out of the so-called counterculture on the west coast of America. Their values were hippy values. They thought the old computer industry as represented by IBM was neanderthal. They laughed at Bell Telephone and AT&T. They thought the TV networks were archaic. Most of them are music lovers. There are plenty of private equity fund managers who are Deadheads.
They were brilliantly innovative in finance and technology and though they would pay lip service to “Content is King” what many of them instinctively realized was that in the digital age there were no mechanisms to police the traffic over the internet in that content, and that legislation would take many years to catch up with what was now possible online.
And embedded deep down in the brilliance of those entrepreneurial, hippy values seems to be a disregard for the true value of music.

Who knew?

McGunniess then went on to pick up the riff started by IFPI CEO John Kennedy in his preface to the 2008 Digital Music Report issued on the eve of Midem: Let's force the ISPs to fix our problems by doing away with safe harbors.

And as it turned, the “Safe Harbour” concept was really a Thieves’ Charter. The legal precedent that device-makers and pipe and network owners should not be held accountable for any criminal activity enabled by their devices and services has been enormously damaging to content owners and developing artists. If you were publishing a magazine that was advertising stolen cars, processing payments for them and arranging delivery of them you’d expect to get a visit from the police wouldn’t you? What’s the difference?

Well, for one thing, content owners agreed to the deal when the law was drafted. Perhaps the market hasn't developed as expected at the time, but that's quite a bit different from knowingly setting out to traffic in stolen cars. It's the same sort of intuitively appealing but logically flawed analogy copyright owners like to use in defense of anti-circumvention of DRM: People have a right to lock their house, and other people should have no right to sell burglary tools to help someone else pick the lock and get in. True, but when you restrict the use of something I've lawfully acquired you're putting a lock on my house and then refusing to provide a key. Different thing.

Not that the difference is likely to help the ISPs. They'll soon be legally on the hook in France and pressure is mounting on the other EU governments to follow suit. In the U.S., some ISPs have agreed to cooperate with content owners to investigate filtering unauthorized content from their networks. Whether they'd accept losing the legal protection of the DMCA safe harbors, however, is likely another question.

The full text of McGunniess's speech, which was not all crazy, is here.
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