Westminster eForum: Tackling illegal file-sharing

The final panel session at this morning's Westminster eForum focuses on tackling digital piracy, kicking off with Will Page from PRS for Music, who begins with the obligatory justification for a collecting society in today's world.PRS just published a paper proposing effectively a levy on ISPs for the illegal content that goes through their networks. “If you're going to build fatter or faster pipes, surely they'll make that problem [piracy] worse?” he says.And he talks about the idea of “incentives” – incentives to align the interests of the various organisations in the value chain, and make them work together. The paper offers a framework to introduce those incentives.“It's akin to carbon-emissions trading,” he says. He compares the impact of fast broadband networks on the legal content market to a “pollution effect” – “Spotify would have a far better chance of swimming rather than sinking if it were not for the unfair pollution effect of illegal file-sharing networks.”So he says PRS' paper is about finding a way to make legal music services more successful, in a nutshell.Next up is Dr Damian Tambini from the London School of Economics, who's also a member of the Communications Consumer Panel – which is the [...]