U2 frontman Bono has called on authorities to implement a tougher control over the proliferation of illegal downloading on the Internet, saying that file-sharing over peer-to-peer networks has a devastating effect on intellectual property rights owners and other creators of “cultural products”.
The Irish rock star stressed that it is the music industry that has become the “sacrificial lamb” in the growing problem of illegal file-sharing in the Internet, saving the movie and television industries.
“A decade’s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators—in this case, the young, fledgling songwriters who can’t live off ticket and T-shirt sales like the least sympathetic among us,” Bono said in his editorial piece for The New York Times.
“The only thing that has protected the TV and movie industries from suffering the same fate as to that of the music industry is the sheer number of downloads that people are looking for. And it is music files that are most commonly being shared over the network,” the frontman said.
“The movie and television industries have been protected from the fate that has befallen music and indeed the newspaper business is the size of the files,” he added.
The U2 lead singer also said that only time will tell if the movie and television industries will go down with music, citing the “immutable laws of bandwidth,” which could potentially allow users to download full movie lengths in just a small period of time.
“The technology and the immutable laws of bandwidth is just a few years away from allowing these users to download movie files and entire TV series in just a matter of seconds,” he cited.
In order for the governments around the world to control the problem, Bono cited the efforts of the United States to stop the huge problem in child pornography and China’s suppression of online contents, saying that it is perfectly possible to keep track and control the Internet content being shared illegally.