"If you turn back the clock when all this stuff was still on the
horizon, the key realisation to have made was that we had lost the
war already," Rowntree told OUT-LAW
Radio, the weekly technology law podcast. "That's what I was
going round telling everybody 10 years ago, saying 'the horse has
bolted, there's no way of undoing what has been done already, the
only thing you can do is to try and turn your business around so
that you turn this into a plus rather than a minus'."
Rowntree advises digital rights advocacy group the Open Rights
Group and has been a vocal opponent of the mainstream record
industry's policies of chasing individual file sharers. When told
that the last Blur album was leaked on to the internet he
reportedly said "I'd rather it gushed".
Rowntree said that the major labels' policies of putting digital
rights management (DRM) technology on music CDs to attempt to stop
them being copied and shared backfired spectacularly.
"DRM was doomed to fail because the people who it was designed
to stop, as in the counterfeiters or the mass file sharers or the
people doing it for political reasons could easily bypass it," he
said.
"But the people who were caught in the trap of DRM were the
ordinary people who wanted to play their CDs on their computer as
well as their CD recorder or who wanted to make a tape of it to put
on in the car who were doing things that most people regardless of
the law would regard as legitimate activities. "
"They have become very much the establishment…by the time that
the industry was starting to fight what they saw as the war against
file sharing they really weren't in anybody's good books any more,
they didn't have the goodwill of the people whose behaviour they
were trying to control."
Having watched the process as part of one of the UK's biggest
bands, Rowntree was ideally placed to observe and advise. He says,
though, that the industry was not necessarily ready to listen. "I
told my own label EMI this five years ago, I said down with them
and said that one of the major labels was going to go bust because
of this, and they said 'it's all in hand'," he said.
