When Mike Weatherley, an MP and the Prime Minister’s advisor on intellectual property, said he thought Google should take an active role in clamping down on piracy, his opponents reacted as if he was lobbying to reinstate the death penalty.
"Piracy remains the biggest threat to the growth of digital commerce," he said. "If we want the UK to continue to be a leader in creativity and innovation, the UK must also be an international leader of IP rights protection."
His critics roared that it was a waste of time, that he was a corporate shill, and that the whole enterprise was government censorship. Many believe they have a right to help themselves to other peoples’ property, or at least act like it.
But even Weatherley admits that the music industry has not helped itself in the fight against file sharing, and as a former vice president for the European division of the Motion Picture Licensing Company, he should know. Many of the hissy fits thrown by the creative industries has merely made them look petulant and punitive towards their customers, and done little to solve the problem.
At a copyright conference only last week Adrian Leppard, commissioner of City of London police, said he didn’t think enforcement would ever be a way out of the problem of piracy. "The only way is to work with industry to prevent and to think about the enabling functions of this crime," he said.
The statistics back him up. The City of London, charged with fighting piracy through its police intellectual property crime unit (PIPCU), reported that less than 10% of the websites it contacted shut down. Many of the websites were global, effectively outside of British jurisdiction. For the commissioner, it is not enough to prosecute organised crime – it is the bottom line of the criminal gangs that must be attacked.
For the open rights groups the police are hopelessly out of touch, perhaps even on the "wrong side of history". But history is not always so predictable as the idealists would like. Despite the huge number of people who pirate content, there are even more who pay for it, and very often these groups overlap.
What the open rights groups do have right is that the best strategy is not to fight the pirates, but to provide a better service than them. People are waking up to how dangerous the internet is, and will happily pay for a reliable service that does not download malware on to their hard drive. The creative industries should let the pirates be vitriolic – there’s plenty of money to be made elsewhere.
