Obviously the film and music industry are extremely supportive, along with the French President Nicolas Sarkozy (the short guy with the hot wife). Sure the legislation seems fair enough, but it does raise a few questions…

Innocent until proven guilty?
How much power will this new state agency have? Now it’s been a while since I’ve brushed up on the French legal system, but it seems to me that the new agency that has been proposed will essentially take away any possibility of a fair trial the user may have had. How is it decided what is illegal activity and where is the line crossed?

These pirates are the clever kind
The people that this law would be aimed at stopping are those that are heavily involved in illegal file sharing. Basically anyone involved our found using Torrents. You know. The kind of people who know how to block their IP’s or mask their IP with the identity of innocent people. But then again, maybe it is the average user they are trying to punish.

This weekend saw us celebrating ANZAC day, and although there wasn’t a public holiday to follow on the Monday, there was still (as always) cause to raise a glass in honour of those ANZAC’s who fought at Galipoli in WWI. This year you would have noticed the ‘VB: Raise a Glass’ campaign created by Droga5, Sydney. The campaign was aimed at raising money for the Returned and Services League (RSL) and Legacy. This was achieved by asking people to donate via the Raise a Glass website as well as $1 from every case of VB sold donated to RSL and Legacy.

The campaign was not only impressive, but also effective, having raised $1.1million as of 27th April. The TV advertisements brought out emotion, as Army veterans take you through their own personal experience of war, raising their glass to their mates who are no longer with us. The website build was kept clean and simple, with a look as if it is itself a document from WWI.

Despite its success, there was quite a bit of controversy as to the message the campaign was trying to send. Obviously being created by an alcoholic beverage company, it’s an obvious guess as to what they would like you to have in the glass you’re raising. This was never mentioned in the TV advertisements, which stated …”whatever you’re drinking”. VB only appearing once in the commercial, alongside RSL and Legacy.

Whether the  incentive of the campaign was merely to increase beer sales, then so be it. At the end of the day over $1million was raised for RSL and Legacy in a well excecuted integrated campaign.

Fallout
The music industry fell victim to verdict fallout with the IFPI site (the source of a lot of the stats I discussed in my previous post) falling victim to a DDoS attack, making the site slow and inaccessible at times.

Appeal
The four men convicted filed an appeal (source) against their charges. Which makes you think that surely the DDoS attacks aren’t going to help the cause…

Is piracy helping legal downloads?
An interesting article on Mashable! and in the Guardian this week discussed a study held in Norway of 2,000 music downloaders over the age of 15 showed that those who download pirated music are 10 times more likely to buy music on the internet. This is obviously due to these users spending more time online, but this surely shows that there is an opportunity to reach a potentially large audience in a growing medium instead of alienating them.

The Music Industry isn’t all bad
I know I’ve spent a lot of time criticising the music industry, but they’re not all bad! The In Sound From Way Out is an MP3 blog hosted by EMI Australia, offering free video’s MP3′s and up-to-date music news. Another Australian site recently launched is We Are Hunted, an online music chart aggregating a variety of sources (including torrents) to determine the most popular songs online.

Update: News has come about that the judge in The Pirate Bay case may have been biased. It was found out that he, as well as others involved in the case, are members of the Swedish Copyright Association. Surely a conflict of interest!

As most of you may have already heard, the verdict for The Pirate Bay trial was announced yesterday. GUILTY. The 4 men involved were sentenced to 1 year in prison each and have to split a total fine of just under $5 million AUD. Of course The Pirate Bay legal team will appeal the decision with more questions being answered in a press conference on their website.

What does all this mean to the entertainment (music and film) industry? Is this the win they were looking for? One thing is for sure, the verdict definately came as surprise to most, especially when you consider a number of key charges were dropped in the early stages of the trial. Such a harsh sentence would not have been predicted, even by the prosecution surely.

The “big 4″ (EMI, Sony BMG, Universal, and Warner) music labels alone used to spend approximately $141.5 million AUD annually on anti-piracy funding. Of course it is important for the entertainment industry to ensure their strict stance on piracy is widely known, but at what cost? The IFPI stated in the Digital Music Report 2009 that 95% of music downloads are unauthorised. Despite this, the music industry grew by approximately 25% in 2008. Some of this has come due to a variety of licensing agreements, in particular the new MySpace Music agreement in the US and the continuing success of iTunes.

My concern is that it has taken such a long time for the music industry to come around to the idea of “selling” online, persisting with the idea that they need to sell physical CD’s. Would their growth not have been greater if the large amount of money spent fighting piracy was in turn used to expand to different mediums such as online. Despite their 25% growth, online revenue of the music industry only grew 5% last year.

Having said that, the music industry has moved a lot faster than film to the online platform, with 20% of it’s revenue generated online compared to film’s 4% (Digital Music Report 2009). The movie industry does have a tougher task in moving online due to large file sizes of movies, but sites such as Hulu (in America) are prime examples of how the industry can successfully move online.

One thing is for certain, illegal downloading will not stop because of this outcome. This is nicely summed on The Pirate Bay homepage…

“Don’t worry – we’re from the internets. It’s going to be alright. :-)”

But then again, Twitter isn’t as fun as Facebook when it comes to stalking ex’s or trying to make that guy/girl you like jealous…