The IFPI - the International Federation of Phonographic Industries - is the global music industry organisation whose very name tells you how long ago progress overtook it. On Thursday it published its digital music report for 2008, which says boldly that "the spread of unlicensed music on ISP networks is choking revenues to record companies and investment in artists, despite a healthy increase in digital sales in 2007, up approximately 40% on the previous year". (If you're wondering, those sales were $2.9bn (£1.45bn) for the year, including ringtones.)
The IFPI's solution? Sort it out at the internet service provider level. "ISP cooperation, via systematic disconnection of infringers and the use of filtering technologies, is the most effective way copyright theft can be controlled. Independent estimates say up to 80 per cent of ISP traffic comprises distribution of copyright-infringing files."
You know what I say? Damn right. Let's get ISPs to stop copyright infringement. But, um, music people? Better form an orderly queue. You think you were the first to suffer from your content getting ripped off and spread to the four corners of the earth? Get to the back of the line, bud. There's a few people ahead of you.
Let me introduce, first, the newspaper industry. We were probably among the very first to realise that the digital medium would be incredibly important in the future, and so we put lots of our content online. Well, more than just the content - almost every newspaper also has blogs, and reader comments, and pieces by journalists that don't appear in the print edition (such as this one).
Article sharing
And you know what? People copy them. They copy-and-paste entire articles from online newspapers to blog sites or to their own computer and they don't pay a thing. Then they read them or "share" them with other people who they might not even have met. I guarantee you that the minute this piece goes onto the Guardian site, a zillion spam blogs will copy its precis and put it on their sites, pretending it's their own. It's choking our investment in new journalism, believe me.
In the past 10 years, hundreds - probably thousands - of journalists have been thrown out of jobs as newspapers and magazines have downsized. Don't give me all that guff about a structural change in the industry, or tell me that the magazine Business 2.0 closed because it didn't give people enough celebrity exposés. No, we the print newspaper industry demand that ISPs stop people sharing our content over the internet. In fact, why not a "reading tax" on ISPs? The more of its customers visit a newspaper site, the more tax it should pay.
Next, pornography. You know, there used to be tons of top-shelf magazines, all earning a comfortable living. Then you know what? The damn internet came along and at a stroke destroyed their business model, in which shifty-gazed commuters had to go into insalubrious shops to get "content". Now there are loads of internet sites (Google reliably tells me) where you can get free amateur porn - exactly the same sort of stuff that people used to pay for! It's shocking (and what's more, there are no unsightly staples in the middle of the pictures).
Unlicensed pornography trading has put paid to some of the best-known names in the industry. Name any porn magazine that isn't 75% thinner now and filled with ads in the back for internet sites. This cannot be allowed to go on. Once again, ISPs bear a heavy responsibility for propelling big porn empires and small corner shops with dimly lit corners - not to mention the makers of high shelves - into penury.
Broken central locking
Next up are motor mechanics. I know - you're wondering how people swap cars over the internet? Tch! Don't be so literal. What we're talking about is people swapping information, the very lifeblood of the motor mechanic. Because remember, these are people whose income depends on being the only ones in a locality who have the time and knowledge to fix cars. Newsgroups - those discussion forums that pre-date pretty much everything that happened after 1999 - are the prime offenders. Take this example of someone brazenly offering a fix for broken central locking in a Vauxhall Zafira. Shameless! Any ISP should be embarrassed to even let it pass over its modems: quite simply, it's taking the food from someone's mouth.
You want me to carry on? There's needlepoint, which in 2000 was revealed to be reeling from an assault by grandmothers and others sending each other needlepoint patterns via email. Oh, the humanity! And of course there are games companies like Nintendo, which had to suffer people swapping their consoles' ROMs over the net. You can imagine how damaged Nintendo was by that. It's never been the same. It crawled away to sob in a hole and close up shop - am I right?
So before the IFPI gets ISPs to start inspecting the packets passing through their routers for music, they'd better sort it out first so that ISPs can see and stop it when someone is copying newspaper articles, or pornographic content, or reading suspiciously helpful newsgroups, or sending a needlepoint pattern that they might not have invented, or downloading a ROM sequence for a now-outdated console. Then we'll be ready to listen to the music industry.
Alternatively, of course, we could try to adapt to the world as it is, rather than dreaming of what it used to be. But hell, where are the headlines in that?