[ubuntu-uk] Digital economy bill

[Rowan Berkeley]

On Thu, 2010-04-08 at 12:00 +0100, Paul Sutton <zleap at zleap.net> wrote:
> While I understand why people download copyrighted material without
> paying for it,  do it as they think the  artists should get a better
> deal,  we need to perhaps campaign for them to get a better deal.
> Let's get a fair deal for artists,  and a fair deal for consumers,
> then perhaps this bill will no longer be needed. Paul

The most well-known, signed-up, nationally or globally promoted artists
certainly lose a lot of their royalties because of pirating, but the
unknown, not-signed-up artists and those signed up with very small
companies which do not do national or global promotions, gain by it,
because their work turns up on file sharers and gets heard, whereas
otherwise no-one would know what they sounded like, even if they were
mentioned occasionally in articles in the music press. However, the
people who lose most are the major companies themselves, of whose
revenues royalty payments to artists are a fairly minor part. Most
pirate filesharing is of globally known and promoted commercial music.