Cheryl Cole’s co-star on the X-factor, Simon Cowell, has backed a letter send to MP’s urging them to pass the Digital Economy Bill and include a three strikes and you’re out rule against persistent IP pirates. Other signatories included Sir Terry Pratchett, Tim Bevan, Paul Greengrass and Stephen Garret.

The text of the letter is below

Britain is admired for its creativity and its sense of fair play. British musicians, singers, actors, writers and directors are known and loved around the world and create some of our greatest assets. Together they contribute more than 7% to the UK economy.

The Digital Economy Bill brings both of these together. It will ensure that British creators, entertainment companies, and the 1.8 million people who work in and around the cultural sector are respected and rewarded in the future as they have been in the past, and that they are fairly paid when they put their work online.

Digital entertainment services are really beginning to take off: fans have never had so much choice as to how to enjoy their music, books, TV and films online. But for these new business models to develop, it is critical that more is done to prevent the illegal services providing easy access to free content.

We urge Parliament to pass this bill as a matter of urgency in order to secure the future of its creative talent and industries.

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X-factor stars back Digital Economy Bill

The recent case in Australia of Roadshow Films Pty Ltd v iiNet Ltd (No.3) brings into focus the challenges of policing the internet and the challenges involved in the forthcoming Digital Economy Bill.

Basically the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft had notified iiNet that their subscribers had been repeatedly illegally downloading Hollywood movies using illegal sites and iiNet had taken no steps to prevent this. iiNet were successfull in arguing that they had safe harbour as they had not “authorised” this infringement. Clearly they were aware of the infringement but had not authorised it.

From a commercial perspective the rights holders and their representatives realise that it is very difficult to chase down hundreds of individuals and would much rather go after a corporation who might be able to pay damages (and legal fees) such as an ISP. From the ISP’s perspective they don’t really want the overhead of shutting down users and also the lost revenue……..cutting off your own customers is never appealing.

Someone is going to have to pay for an anti-piracy service to avoid meltdown in this area but the tough question is who ? The content owners have the most to lose so they should pay something but at the same time there needs to be the ability to shut down the internet connections of repeat offenders as well as remove the ability of the pirates to make money via AdSense.

Policing Piracy is a cost to all in the internet value chain that is not going away – the difficult question is how to fairly allocate that cost.

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Australian Rules

This week’s Economist magazine examines the concept of ‘broken Britain’, the contention that the country is ‘going to the dogs’ and comes to a surprising conclusion: overall things are better than they’ve ever been and it’s largely the fault of a sensationalist media that the public take such a doomed view of their lives.

Now, journalism, especially UK newspaper journalism, has always been full of doom and gloom. And this in turn influences other journalists. And naturally, moaning and groaning is the lot of bloggers, including the authors of this website, so this isn’t an affliction restricted to the professional media.

In the US things tend to be reversed, where newspapers on the whole, tend to be held to a higher account of veracity whereas channels such as Fox News are able to display any editorial balance their editors and owners deem fit.

At a time when everyone is questioning the value of journalism and contemplating charging for content, this becomes a very important issue. The tendency is to become more competitive and more sensational in order to justify the charges being levied: the news gatherers become the news makers and the agenda is set on our screens not our ballot boxes. The Pulitzer v Heart newspaper wars that stoked the coals that lit the US Spanish war is a lesson from history (and there are plenty of other examples).

We are all more media literate today, but the pervasiveness of the negative news agenda is worrying.

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Looking On The Bright Side

We've been working diligently over the past couple of years at TV Everywhere to come up with the model for the future of television. We believe that there are three important pieces to this: delivery, distribution and technology. And we've been investing heavily in all of these.

Perhaps the most important issue of all is one that does not fall comfortably into any of the above categories, but impacts them all – rights management.

At Rights Tracker we're working on an API to enble rights for video across the internet. Indeed, we hope that this will become the real 'tv everywherel whereby anyone who has bought a right will be able to authenticate it on any device or medium in any format.

This is already what the software does for major TV rights owners in the UK. Now we're taking the genie out of the bottle…

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Now This Really Is TV Everywhere

One of the IP Pirates favourite routes to market for live streams has just raised $20m from Japan’s well respected Softbank. Perhaps to defend the coming copyright infringement actions.

In any event this solid live distribution platform offers a 50% share of revenue to its content partners which could prove attractive and certainly offers some competitition to YouTube in its activities in live streaming.

With just a few clicks we can all go live and share whatever we can see on our TV’s…….bad news for the traditional streaming providers but pretty good news for the smaller independent producer.

This will buy a lot of time to figure out how to make money from the model and may cause further concern for the live subscription and ppv operators.

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Ustream raise $20m – here we go…………….