Digital piracy 'suppresses creativity'

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Digital piracy, copyright infringement and the suppression of creativity in the United Kingdom were all on the agenda at this week's meeting of the all-party parliamentary group on intellectual property.

Five guest speakers from creative industries including writing, film, publishing, music and the Premier League were invited to discuss the Digital Economy Bill, due for its second reading in the Lords on December 2.

The Bill may read like the Marine Offences Act for the twenty-first century, but as the group heard, digital piracy affects the jobs of many normal people and ultimately, the end user.

To paraphrase a speaker from Universal Music: if a company invests one-quarter of its profits into the development of new talent, then a £200-million loss in revenue due to piracy will have knock-on effects which will reduce the quantity and variety of new music content.

Football clubs are finding themselves in a similar situation. A representative of Fulham FC discussed how a portion of profits are used to invest in their youth development programme, the primary vehicle for discovering the country's next great football talents.

"Illegal streaming of matches via internet sites results in lost revenue normally expected from sports-channel subscription fees. The short-fall will trickle down to the youth academies and means fewer coaches, less equipment and poorer quality programmes."

While file-sharing and digital piracy may seem miniscule at present, a guest from Random House Publishing assured the group that "as the digital economy grows, so to will the demand for cheap and readily-available pirated content".

An independent author attending the meeting commented on another creative industry.

"Journalism is affected by mass-circulation and reproduction of quotes or news articles through numerous vehicles, without appropriate reparations made to the author. Often the perpetrator doesn't realise he or she is infringing on the copyright."

If this kind of piracy makes it difficult to survive in the creative industries such as film, music, writing and professional sports, then consequently they will become more difficult to get into.

The great fear expressed by all those present was that piracy could lead to a suppression of creativity both from those within the industries who are not earning enough to support themselves and from those outside who feel it is not worth attempting to break into in the first place.