OK, the headline is very mischievous but were this to be the Daily Mail then I’m sure it would pass as being wholly legitemate piece of journalism. That said, it’s not necessarily that far from the truth and here’s how.

This stems from his speech to the British Phonographic Industry the other day in which he had this to say regarding the issue of illegal downloads of music.

”
We need you in the music industry itself to continue to innovate and make the sort of technological progress that makes pirating CDs more and more difficult.

They should be doing the same when it comes to digital piracy.”

Dave’s not too good on this whole internet thing as we’ve all sort of picked up on by now but as someone with a desire to take over the reigns of power it would be nice to think he either one, has people with credible enough knowledge of the subject he’s talking on to advice him and two, he knows a little bit about the way the current legal structure works.

First up, let’s deal with Dave’s lack of knowledge on the old technology front and pin him down to something he believes in, yes I know it’s hard but there’s at least one thing we can gather from his speech.

Dave’s a supporter of DRM (digital rights management), which makes him a bit of a divvy in my book purely for that but fundamentally what it reveals is that Davey boy believes that the music industry should continue to waste substantial amounts of money investing in systems that by their very nature are doomed to failure. It does not matter what encoding is placed on media, it’s crackable. There is of course a trade off on performance as well. The more complex the encoding, the longer the decoding takes by whatever legitimate hardware is being used to play back the media which is crap for the end user as well.

However it’s when Mr Cameron moves on to ISP, the internet and filesharing P2P networks that he really drops his pants and deserves a good spanking.

He claims that ISP’s are the ‘gatekeepers’ of the internet. Sorry Dave, no they’re not and quite frankly they have no desire to be either. Thankfully though, those lovely people over at the EU have a nice little directive that covers this one if he’d like to go and look it up, it’s here, the European Directive on Electronic Commerce and it says:

“Article 12
‘Mere conduit’
1. Where an information society service is provided that
consists of the transmission in a communication network of
information provided by a recipient of the service, or the
provision of access to a communication network, Member
States shall ensure that the service provider is not liable for the
information transmitted, on condition that the provider:
(a) does not initiate the transmission;
(b) does not select the receiver of the transmission; and
(c) does not select or modify the information contained in the
transmission.
2. The acts of transmission and of provision of access
referred to in paragraph 1 include the automatic, intermediate
and transient storage of the information transmitted in so far
as this takes place for the sole purpose of carrying out the
transmission in the communication network, and provided
that the information is not stored for any period longer than
is reasonably necessary for the transmission.”

So that we know, ISP’s aren’t gatekeepers and are not responsible for the content of traffic that passes through their systems, they are at their most basic level, the people in charge of the plumbing, they’re not gatekeepers and certainly not the ‘net police’ but it appears Dave would like them to be.

Mr Cameron states that some ISP’s say there’s nothing they can do to stop music piracy. Strangely enough I would have thought they’d all say that but lets just have a little look at the logistics of this, don’t worry, I won’t get too techie on you.

First up, ISP’s would have to invest in a rather substantial amount of extra hardware but yes, it is possible to monitor every single bit of data that flows across a network. The problem comes when analysing exactly what that data is. I know it is more complicated than this in case any techies drop by, but say for instance someone is transferring an MP3 file. It could be picked up through its file extension. It would have to be screened out as having not come from a legitimate download site which will require registration, a whole lot more bureaucracy and cost to the industry but that’s nothing new from the Tories.

If such a file was flagged up as having originated from an unregistered website then yes, something could be done about it. Problem being, it’s immensely easy to navigate around. Among other techniques you could simply compress the files into say a ZIP format and you won’t get caught. ZIP files are used extensively across the net to compress files to make them easier and quicker to download and I can’t exactly see their use being banned in the interest of trying to combat illegal music downloading.

Then there’s the problem that on the whole, we’re not talking about illegal downloading of files from specific sites. P2P file sharing techniques don’t work that way. Again though the same problems exist and like ZIP files, there’s plenty of people, myself included who use P2P systems like bit torrent for wholly legitimate reasons. Downloading a gig’s worth of ISO image is a bit of a pain at times so any system that increases download time is well worth it.

The trouble is Dave just doesn’t get all this techie stuff so he should really steer clear of it. To achieve what he’s suggesting would require the effective removal of music from pretty much every website. A quick example would be YouTube. There’s plenty of music videos on YouTube, some legal, some obviously illegal, but if one wanted the music, it’s not exactly hard to download the embedded Flash file and strip out the audio content.

What he’s proposing if it were possible which it isn’t; is to turn ISP’s into the secret police of the internet snooping in on everyone’s online activity, so there’s your police state, and of course this is going to cost the ISP’s quite a lot of money, costs that will be passed on to you and me the consumer, so in true Daily Mail fashion, there’s your stealth tax.

Actually to be fair to David Cameron he did say one sensible thing in his speech. A call to end the ciminalisation of people who copy music from one format to another for their own personal use. We are to my knowledge the only EU country where this practice is still considered illegal and it’s strange that this outdated bit of legislation hasn’t been changed yet, especially as the industry itself backs it and it’s never been enforced as pretty much everyone does or has done it at some point.

I only say this because I’ve spent the whole day encoding half my CD collection into MP3 format to put on my mobile phone to listen to while I’m out. I’ve been meaning to do it for ages and listening to the same 8 songs over an over can get a bit tedious at times.

Waiting for the knock at the door.