Why Keep Downloads on the Down-Low?

A few years ago if you started talking about digital rights management (DRM), people would make excuses and leave the room. Now it is a talking point in clubs and pubs as record companies try to sue people, for illegal downloads or uploads, and governments across Europe are threatening to take Apple to court to open up its hugely successful iTunes software to competitors.

DRM is not just a problem for the music industry. Recently I attended a seminar at the British Library (standing room only, by the way), which is deeply worried about the way restrictive digital rights contracts are being imposed by companies. The British Library is one of the world's great treasure houses, yet less than one percent of its priceless archive has been digitised because of potential conflicts about digital rights and preservation. If that's not a digital scandal then I don't know what is.

To understand the problem we need to stand back a bit. A number of businesses, most dramatically the music industry, are beginning to realise that the business model they have controlled for so long is falling apart - and they want to lock it in with legal sanctions before it is too late.

The present model whereby thousands of would-be bands try (mainly unsuccessfully) to showcase their talents to a small number of decision makers, many of them with - excuse the pun - poor track records, is disappearing.

It is, or will be, replaced by a much more efficient model whereby artists parade their talents through videos on sites such as MySpace or YouTube, or to be judged, or even voted on, by the record buying public itself.

It gives every band a chance of being seen on the radar and the price of music will come tumbling down because the need to support the middlemen of the old media will have disappeared. Consumers are becoming producers. And it is not just happening with music. A similar revolution is taking place in book publishing (see Lulu, where you publish a book for under six dollars) or art (see The Saatchi Gallery site, where you can feature your paintings for nothing).

The music industry still talks about downloading a track as if it was stealing a record from a shop and warns that a whole generation is being brought up not used to paying for their music. What rot. The same people allegedly refusing to pay for downloaded free tracks are the same people who, amazingly, are prepared to pay £3.50 to buy part of a track in the form of a ringtone. The difference? Ringtones have an easy payment system whereas downloads, at least until the arrival of iTunes, did not.

There will always be pirates but most people are prepared to pay for goods as long as a payment system is available and they are not asked to pay through the nose.

I am strongly in favour of artists being paid for their creations - as long as it is reflected fairly in the price. But you can't buy a record these days, only the right to play it on certain occasions in a defined format on a single manufacturer's hardware. You can, however, hear a track for nothing on the radio, or get it free as a newspaper promo or search for it on an internet radio station such as Shoutcast, (which will let you listen in to stations around the world where your chosen track is being played at that moment).

Add on to that the fact the cost of "manufacturing" an extra track and delivering to your device is zero in the digital age, and you can see why prices ought to come down. Even if they don't record, companies can still sell if they get their marketing right.

They could learn a lot from the mineral water industry, which manages to sell us expensive bottles in restaurants rather than the free alternative of tap water, which, according to the water inspectorate, is at least as good.

The important point is that governments - for it is governments that make the laws - should act now to stop digital rights lawyers from imposing their own contracts on people often (as may be the case with Apple) in conflict with the existing law of the land.

If the digital rights evangelists succeed they may nail the status quo in place and prevent, or retard, the digital revolution from delivering its enormous potential to the people. Maybe they should start with the British Library and similar national archives.

The starting point should be the proposition that it is hugely in the public interest that the BL's priceless treasures be made available to everyone in the world, and work out a way to do that quickly, before it is too late.