ISPs slam Digital Economy Bill's multi-million pound price tag

Why?

£500 million cost.

£1.7 *BILLION* extra in sales.

Almost three and a half times the cost. Why can't the media industry pay for this in it's entirety?

Madness or bad statistics?

So the plan is to charge the British consumer £5 billion over ten years in order to pay the entertainment industry £1.7 billion?

Either madness or bad statistics. Or maybe both.

(Note the comparison of a yearly figure of costs against a ten-year figure of industry "rewards" to hide the huge discrepancy. And the claimed £500 million sounds about right - the Office for National Statistics lists 18.3 million households, times £25 per year = £475 million. Allow for new subscribers and you get the £500 *per year*.)

That old (nu-labour)chestnut

Guilty until proven innocent, but in the mean time, were gonna charge you for the privalidge of being an honest citizen. Oh and we'll still keep tabs on you.

Q: Whats the difference between a guilty UK citizen and an innocent UK citizen?

A: Correct, there is no difference.

1700 mill gain over 7 years,cost of 500Mil/year

GBP1.7 billion gain over 7 years, at a cost of GBP0.5 billion per year. So how is this not a bailout to music execs to maintain there bonuses and punishing lunch schedules of caviare and dope. So in essence this handout is free money. Why not give them the money then license downloads like the radio. Then at least you get something for your bailout.

Oh, why is legislation only supporting one industry with capital, what about the war vets, even though no one steals from them if you are giving billions away surely you would pick a sector of the community that has actually contributed something?

Government pulls big number from ass...

"At the same time the government's assessment found that the DEB could plump up £350m in extra tax for the Treasury, as well as bring in around £1.7bn in sales to content owners."

£1.7bn? The old every download is a lost sale road apple again?

Free loaders will not buy anything other then a vpn service maybe.

People who download stuff that's not available in there area as defined by the content owners, can't buy it.

People who download a TV show, then buy the box set when it's released may not buy the box set if they don't know if it's any good.

I expect they could increase sales more by allowing anyone to buy from any iTunes site no mater where they live. But the control freaks are not going to go for that.

Tax man

"At the same time the government's assessment found that the DEB could plump up £350m in extra tax for the Treasury"

And that bit stops all forms of discussion right there.

So in other terms...

The government is next going to start asking road builders to pay more money in taxes because people speed on the roads ?

Fock you, Mandy

This infuriates me to no end.

Music lovers know the music and movie industries are doing little but make the artists' and consumers' lives difficult by leeching off of both, and it's in everybody's interest for them to disappear. I do NOT want to bail out those industries (their debt is their own fault, not mine), and I most certainly do not want them spying on my internet connection.

This is an unprecedented violation of privacy, it is despicable and the way it is brought in is completely undemocratic. There are possibly millions of UK citizens out there who are strongly opposed to this proposal, and if the government goes through with it, they are blatantly working against the wishes and interests of their people!

Methinks Mandy had a good "talking" with Geffen on that yacht in the Mediterranean. That's when he sold this country out.

When...

The music industry cried foul and insisted on a tax on blank tapes (remember that one?) I thought "sod it, if I have to pay the fine I might as well do the crime"... so if they "tax" my internet connection I'll just make certain I get my £25 worth of free music each year.

hey, have you heard of this thing called streaming media?

Seriously. I don't understand why people view file sharing all that differently, the vast majority of it out there, if we somehow woke up tomorrow and all the torrenting and p2p programs in the world went belly up, we'd just go back to the way we used to do it. Rip it from the radio, pull it from streaming transmission, rent copies and burn them. In Canada, and the US, an unlimited Game/Video rental account at blockbuster is CHEAPER than a decent internet connection. I'll just go rent/rip 1080p across the street. No different than taping from the old VHS.

Honestly folks, if the powers that be came to me and said "Jeff, we're thinking charging a little more each month, from all our providers, but in exchange, do whatever you want with your connection. download movies, games, music, what have you. We're going to take that money (that little extra) and hand it right over to the Artists and producers that created that content for you." I'd say sure, why the fuck not. It's not like the content isn't going to be moved in that direction eventually anyways. All a bill like this does is validate piracy (if you can call it that), by moral balance - This extra 25$ on my bill is for file sharing, so damn it, I'm going to go get my 25$ worth of media out of it. after all, IVE ALREADY PAID FOR IT.

Put your content online, make it more accessible, make it free. Free, in case you missed the memo, is the new $9.95.

Save the music industry

Funny, the government didn't seem to give a toss about the mining industry, the ship building industry, the car industry, the aerospace industry...

Guess their yachts and champagne luncheons just didn't cut it.

Message Mandelson.

I suggest you lot head over to the Open Rights Group website, and send Mandy a message:

http://threestrikes.openrightsgroup.org/

This grinds my gears

I really am appalled at this Bill which falls down at every stage. So Mandy is supporting a Bill which is contains an Impact Assessment made up of figures so grossly overestimated that any lay person can see it. The £1.7billion in lost revenue the music industry claims is based on an exaggerated price per download (something like £20 each). If you reduce this to £1 a download the lost revenue is £85million, still not chump change but now assume only 80% is listened to or watched and it drops to £68million. This is also supposed to be over 10yrs so this again drops to £6.8million and now we’re getting close to something that could be written off by the companies as a ‘Marketing Expense’ (as there are reports that people who pirate still spend more overall on Media than those who don’t) and of that the lost tax to £1.4million!!!!!

Added to this the people who download are mostly doing this out of frustration with the current Media industries business models and would act legally if they could find what they wanted at a reasonable price. What’s more the Bills Impact Assessment states that Record companies have to invest a lot is a small number of artists with broad appeal (X-factor anyone) in order to make a return. This is not what people actually want and so the industry is actually acting against diversity and excellence and driving everything towards manufactured mediocrity.

What is needed is a reduction on internet radio costs, social media websites (modify or combine Facebook and iTunes) where social mechanisms can drive sales, enablers for bands and artists to get there music published at the minimum of cost and to own THEIR music, and the music industry to be hired as an assistant by the musicians.

What isn’t needed, or permitted as the French found out, is cutting off of the internet which is against our human rights and I don’t see how they could tell I was pirating without snooping in my personal data which is against the data protection act!!! And if this is the case then the technology is already there to get around this.

Copyright is *not* theft

So why should ISP's be required to police someone else's problem?

Complete stupidity.

So let me get this straight. This scheme will cost £500 million a year and will increase music and film sales by £1.7 billion over 10 years.

Now maybe I'm bad at maths, but spending £5 billion to increase profits by £1.7 billion doesn't actually make any kind of financial sense whatsoever.

This is especially troubling because:

a) Our Government have always drastically underestimated costs, especially when comes to insanely ambitious IT projects nobody wants. The real cost will almost certainly turn out to be 3 or 4 times higher.

b) This won't encourage anyone to stop downloading illegally and start buying full-price albums / movies again, so I doubt there will be anything like a £1.7 billion increase in music and movie sales. In fact, I can only see it putting even more people off.

c) When the new law inevitably fails to produce the results the music and movie industry wants, the £25 a year fee will undoubtedly increase.

And they plan to implement this a couple of months before the General Election? Yes, good luck with that(!)

The Bill is set to be scrutinised by a committee on 6 January. ®

"The Bill is set to be scrutinised by a committee on 6 January. ®"

Hmm interesting , it oesnt sem to be listed as business today ?

if you check the URL

http://www.parliament.uk/about/how/committees/general.cfm

it clearly states "The main role of General Committees is to consider proposed legislation, mostly Public Bills, in detail. This committee system allows faster processing of Bills and is unique to the House of Commons;...."

and yet http://www.parliament.uk/_shared/customcf/feeds/commons_news.cfm?tab=general_committee&calendarname=Commons%20General%20Committees

upuntil a few minutes ago, before 6am it listed yesturdays business and now says "TimeBusinessThere is no business today"

So weres this Digital Economy Bill scrutinised by General Committee taking place, and were can we view it realtime, preferably in video format and later text OC...

are You following this up Elreg ? ,perhaps chris should be following this in more detail today ?