It's good to know where you stand with politicians. Yet when it comes to being digital, standing with the Conservative party is like dancing with a hippo on a bouncy castle. You're not going to be in the same place for long.
We applauded shadow chancellor George Osborne's March commitment to open source, open standards and the internet way. As he said: "The internet is like the child pushing at boundaries of authority and challenging the established way of doing things — the business models from the last century, traditional media, long-accepted notions of national jurisdiction and concepts of governmental control. The challenge is for the 'pushed' — probably most of us here in this room — to resist the urge to push back: to regulate and legislate; to try to tame and to control."
Compare this to his boss, talking to the British Phonographic Industry last week. "We need you in the music industry itself to continue to innovate and make the sort of technological progress that makes pirating CDs more and more difficult", David Cameron told them, after promising to: "Establish a proper framework of intellectual property rights... [and] enforce laws more strongly so perpetrators are brought to book".
And to sweeten the deal still further: "... it is only right that you are given greater protection on your investments by the extension of copyright term." He went on to suggest that the industry could earn this increase in monopoly rights by providing "positive role models" for children. Regulate and legislate; tame and control.
Cameron may be telling the industry what it wants to hear, but it's as nonsensical as curing alcoholism with whisky. If we have learned anything from the past decade, it is that the music industry — indeed, the old intellectual property-based industries as a whole — has grown lazy and defensive through being given too much control, by being allowed to write the laws to suit itself and then demand deference. Now that such an approach is technically impossible to maintain and the customers are in open revolt, merely demanding more of the same is beyond satire. It's negligent, lazy and harmful — and in direct conflict with the facts.
Wholesale reform and new approaches are needed, not digging in to defend the ancient regime. The shadow chancellor affirms this. The leader of the opposition denies this. The rest of us have no idea what they think. Time to de-hippo that castle.
