Vote 2005

One man on a lonely platform

When is one of the parties going to take a stand on one of the big issues of individual freedom – namely stopping the music industry from harassing people who share music with each other online?

Ok, I know, none of them. They all want their invites to the Brit Awards (perhaps not Prescott) and which celeb rock stars would back them if they supported ‘illegal downloading’?

But come on – I just, erm, came across the original 1980 12″version of Fade to Grey by Visage. How long would that take you to find on a second hand market?

Maybe if you did manage to hunt a copy down, you would pay a fiver for it but no royalties would find their way to Visage out of that deal.

Would a decent compromise not be to ban all LPs (which have a long sales life) from file sharing and all singles from the last two years? The rest of the music avaliable online is the electronic version of the second-hand market and no-one really is losing out from that.

Update: On the very slight off chance that Steve Strange comes across this post – I’ll be in London soon so I’d be happy to pass the fiver on to you. As long as you don’t turn up in that make-up.