Another day another party deciding there is something else that needs banning or enforcing through extreme prohibition. I thought Labour could get no more idiotic after last week's series of woeful announcements on housing, dental health and internal investigations...yet here we are again, this time with kicking "illegal file sharers" off of the net.

Initially this throws up several questions; How does the government and ISPs intend to tell conclusively that someone is file sharing illegally or legally? What assurances can the consumer have that ISPs won't just "play it safe" when it comes to high bandwidth and kick off anyone with high usage no matter how legitimate? How is this truly enforceable with so many unsecured networks around the UK, and indeed internet Cafes, without truly spying on what every person is accessing on the net? Do we really need to resort to French policy to solve our own issues?

A spokesman for the Internet Service Providers Association told the Times it remained hopeful that a deal over a voluntary system could still emerge. "Every right-thinking body knows that self-regulation is much the better option in these areas," he said.

Indeed the nature of "theft" when in relation to digital media is a much more complicated issue than the music industry tried to suggest when rolling out bullshit adverts including Britney Spears stating "you wouldn't steal a car", as if it were that comparable in the first place. It would seem that the various industries are in support of child neglect, hardcore substance abuse, rape and gang violence as long as it sells records, yet the ambiguous situation of just how much money is lost through P2P music sharing is bad enough to incur the wrath of the full force of the business in a court of law.

I say ambiguous because no-one has ever truly studied (from an objective point of view) the losses or benefits of illegal file sharing. I remember looking at the sales figures produced by the RIAA during the height of Napsters reign as the one and only outlet for mass illegal file sharing and seeing that their CD sales were the highest they'd been and well above usual profit increase rates. They also suffered a downturn in trade when they successfully bullied Napster in to surrender, so really I've been waiting for any kind of study on this issue to come about.

And now that time seems to have come, at the end of last year, a Canadian study showed that there are actually positive correlations between illegal downloading and CD sales. Obviously not necessarily attributable to the British populace, but would you hope we are more like the Canadians than the Americans (not that they've been surveyed objectively either)? Clearly the issue over the impact of just how much illegal downloading costs the industry is up in the air, those arguing about profits conveniently ignoring indirect benefits that need to be weighed up such as proliferation, quality checking and word of mouth. To me it looks to all be about power of control over peoples tastes.

It's no secret that the industry is in a long period of flux and no-one really seems to be able to sit around the table together and work out what the solution is. Those in charge of representing all the big labels simultaneously support blanket charges, either in the form of taxation on internet bills or in great value for money subscription costs, that would allow the industry to gather a large sum of money each year in guaranteed revenue and divide it fairly between them.

There are issues here, how the public would react to a tax and just how fair it would be to blanket charge everyone for the sum of $1 a month when roughly only 12% of the population are known to be file sharers were all discussed at the end of last year at the In The City music conference/festival.

Founder of The Orchard, Scott Cohen, was the loudest advocate of a blanket license.
There's no point chasing pirates with view to converting a P2P transaction into a discrete paid download.
"But people are getting access to music. If they paid just $1 a month they don't know, we have 1.1bn ISP customers and 2.6bn mobile customers, giving us $45bn overnight to be divided up."

What was discussed wouldn't touch physical sales and so CDs would still cost the bomb they do currently, perhaps even more, but it would solve the issue of a "paid for" service never being able to be as value for money as an unending and unlimited source of "free" downloads. Even good ideas such as QTrax have shown that the leaders are not really all that willing to embrace these new ideas without double signed and sealed assurances over their profits.

In fact it seems the only example of blanket charging that can be found on the market currently are services provided by mobile phone providers that will now charge small amounts of money for "unlimited" access to tracks, perhaps able to do so because music on mobile technology is still a fledgling business that the music industry haven't managed to sabotage with years of hand wringing and toy dumping, such as they did with the advance of the internet as a medium for sharing digital media.

The market seems to slowly be coming around the a consensus, blanket charging is feeling like more and more of a mainstream idea, and despite the ominous term "tax" one has to wonder just how opposed the public would be to paying a small amount for at least the right to download what they want in terms of music (and maybe films too, though that would invariably cost more). But the industry does need convincing, and it is why we so desperately need empirical evidence, and until that time we can't expect them to act in any other way than to ask for more legal assistance from those that are in some form involved in illegal activity as ISPs are. That doesn't mean, however, that everyone in the industry agrees with the fervent desire of the "Big Four" to keep hold of their market shares.

What we can expect however is for our government to not act like a business such as it is doing with this green paper, it is meant to act in the interests of all of us and placing so much responsibility on ISPs can only lead to the end user getting over-scrutinised, wrongly accused and at worst have their privacy infringed upon to protect provider profits. Why now does the government feel it needs to step in, other than of course because it needs to have a hand in just about every affair of the British population? They've conducted no review of their own, which is startling given that they'll review just about anything they can, and are just jumping in with a copy of the recently arranged French model of bullying ISPs in to being more like police than providers.

This is a bad move that is unfortunately completely unsurprising by the Brown administration, and it just goes to show how their culture of "making sure" that the choices they make are right through consultation and review only apply when they are spending their own..I mean our... money, and not when they are attempting to protect their personal, or large corporation's, piggy banks.