If only they'd thought about this a bit earlier, they could have staged Live8.2, a series of politically charged concerts designed to pressure G8 leaders to Make Piracy History. As it is, all they managed was a polite letter to the slightly scary Margaret Beckett who is, in case you'd forgotten (I know I had), our current Foreign Secretary.
Yep, the BPI has confirmed that it wrote to Maggie Beckett ahead of this weekend's G8 Summit in St Petersburg asking her to bring up the issue of AllofMP3.com with Russian president Vladimir Putin.
As previously reported, the BPI intends to sue Moscow based AllofMP3.com through the UK courts because it sells digital music to British consumers at cut price rates without the appropriate licences to do so. The Russian download service claims it is operating legitimately in its home country. While the International Federation Of The Phonographic Industry say they are not even convinced of that, it is the fact that AllofMP3.com is proving a popular source of downloads around the world that is causing Western record companies the most concern.
In the letter to Beckett, who was due to be in session with Russian officials at the G8 proceedings this weekend, BPI chief Peter Jamieson wrote: "This website is doubly damaging because it encourages consumers to believe that royalties are paid to artists and record companies. In fact, no such arrangements are in place with British rightsholders (nor with those of any other nations as far as we can tell). We therefore ask the government to raise the issue of AllofMP3.com directly with President Putin, and to urge the Russian Government to take action against the operators of the site by insisting that it is removed from the internet".
Noting that, responding to global pressure on the issue, Putin has recently made a number of calls to tighten Russian rules protecting intellectual property, Jamieson continued: "President Putin has clearly stated his commitment to protecting intellectual property rights. We would like the UK government to call on President Putin to honour this 'duty' to Russia's foreign partners, by taking action against a Russian website that is violating international intellectual property law. I hope that the UK government will be able to raise this issue at the G8 Summit, and help reinforce the importance of international collaboration in tackling the issue of piracy which threatens not just the music industry, but all of the UK 's creative sector."
Pro-P2P website P2P.net covered this story, though I can't quite figure out what their viewpoint on the whole thing is. It's possible that, overall, they don't think it was such a good idea. See what you think.
P2P.net: "In an act of absolutely astounding arrogance, the BPI, the so-called 'trade' unit owned by Warner Music, Vivendi Universal, EMI and SonyBMG, is demanding that UK foreign secretary Margaret Beckett raises its attempt to crush p2p site AllofMP3.com with Russian president Vladimir Putin at the G8 summit. The members of the Big Four Organized Music cartel have awarded themselves nationhood status and routinely lecture and hector governments and heads of state for failing to toe the corporate bottom line, also using international enforcement agencies, funded by local taxpayers, as copyright cops. But this is extreme even for the Big Four".
Having read that back I think we here at CMU must take issue. AllofMP3.com isn't, technically speaking, a P2P site.