Rowntree says sensible things

Oh look, it's that lovely Dave Rowntree from Blur speaking some sense during an interview on the podcast from e-legal mag OUT-LAW. He was asked about the way the record industry has responded to the arrival of the internet and P2P and all that jazz. Here's what he says: "If you turn back the clock when all this stuff was still on the horizon, the key realization to have made was that we had lost the war already. 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. 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. 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 behavior they were trying to control". He speaks sense you know.