Record companies need to do their bit

PROACTIVE, representative and on the ball — that’s what the Government would like us to say about its valiant efforts to forge forth with Great Britannia.

But its attempt to get a grip on the trend of illegal downloads in the UK has been a bit of a joke.

Political heavyweight, Business Secretary Vince Cable has announced changes to age-old copyright laws that could change the face of the music industry forever.

Sound too good to be true? You bet.

Part of the new plans mean that music lovers will now be able to convert the format of legally-bought music to store it on to their Mp3 players or computer.

Talk about closing the stable door once the horse has bolted.

With “burning” or “ripping” cds to your computer becoming commonplace in the past decade, it would be reasonable to guess that only a handful of music fanatics knew that this was still illegal.

Such a decision is a decade overdue.

After all, surely a reward for supporting the music industry and forking out hard-earned cash for tunes should be to be able to listen to it in whichever form you choose.

Yet the copyright conundrum is not a modern beast, imagine police storming into your front room just as you finished recording Blue Monday on to cassette from the radio 20 years ago.

Yet at the very time that Government has thrown this crumb to music fans, it’s also been announced that it is scrapping plans to block websites that host copyright infringing material.

The reason behind this is the woolly term that it would be “unworkable”.

Plans to continue to send out warning letters to those illegally downloading music are however to stay intact.

Yet the real issue surely lies with record companies themselves and their failure to be proactive in combating the problem.

The massively successful iTunes model has proved that the digital version of stack ’em high and sell ’em cheap that lured in millions of customers can work.

Even though it now charges 99p per song, over the odds for the product, it’s the method of choice for many down to convenience and sheer breadth of the choice in the online library.

Until record companies become less reluctant to charge over-inflated prices for products instead attracting illegal downloaders with a cheaper legal option, the war will be a hard one to win.