Imagine a year without Internet: a year when your IP address, the number identifying your computer network, is blacklisted. This is the ultimate consequence under new legislation in France that would outlaw peer-to-peer file sharing.
Users downloading music, movies and video games illegally would first be singled out by an e-mail telling them to stop, then a formal letter. If downloading continued, Internet access would be cut off from three months to a year.
No wonder this bill is being called the toughest of its kind in the world.
I get nervous seeing France taking such drastic steps towards state surveillance of the Internet. Nervous because when the Canadian government finally gets around to updating its copyright legislation, it will be looking for models to emulate. And this doesn’t look good.
Jacques Attali, a French economist and government advisor who vehemently opposes the bill, says it “paves the way for blanket surveillance” of the Internet. In his 1977 book about the political economy of music, Attali argues that music above all other arts “stands both as a promise of a new, liberating mode of production, and as the menace of a dystopian possibility.”
Since the Internet has radically transformed the way we think about creativity, file-sharing has become music’s new mode of production. So I find it mind-boggling for governments – in France, in the U.S. – to criminalize what has already become normal behaviour.
In Canada, Angus Reid released the results of an online survey conducted earlier this month which shows how “file sharing has become the ‘new normal’ for most online Canadians.” Nearly half of those who responded said sharing music and movies is normal Internet behaviour.
What’s more, a resounding 73 per cent disagreed with a proposed levy on Internet service providers to compensate musicians. And only three per cent agreed that file sharing should be punished by law.
To outlaw file-sharing is to challenge those who share to be more creative. Stopping this flux now is not only impractical but impossible.
To reassure any musicians, the survey also indicates that those who share files on the Internet are more likely to buy music and go to live concerts.
However, some musicians already know this. Bands including Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have begun releasing music for free online. But they’re simply picking up on what lesser-known, independent and local musicians have been doing for years because they depend on Internet publicity.
Local musician David Quesnelle, who goes by the moniker Male Nurse, just released an album for free online.
He says file-sharing happens because digital music is now such a throwaway commodity. CD sales, he adds, aren’t a viable source of revenue for musicians anymore. That said, he did buy the recent Radiohead album even though it was free online.
At a grassroots level, he says “giving [music] away will just incite people to buy it more.”
“I know people will buy [physical copies] when I play live just because, if they want to support me and they like it, they’ll buy it.”
When recorded music is so easy to access, performance becomes the primary medium not just for musicians, but for concertgoers too. It’s the experience of music that is emotive, not the product.
Ultimately, music doesn’t happen on the Internet. It happens in bedrooms, basements and living rooms; local coffeehouses, restaurants and clubs. I’ve even seen a pay-what-you-can concert sitting on the ground in a friend’s backyard.
I’ll admit to having shared music, but it doesn’t mean I am a criminal. It means I am a music-lover. So they’ve caught me – my hands are up. I love music and I go to concerts regularly. For me, it’s a way of life.
At the same time, I am concerned about properly compensating musicians for their work, because for them, it’s their livelihood. But let’s acknowledge that the essence of a musician’s work cannot simply be packaged, bought and sold.