Mark Dearey (Green Party)

I regularly look back through my record collection. The labels include Two Tone, Terri Hooley's Good Vibrations in Belfast, Stiff Records and Mulligan Records. I revelled in buying albums that did not come from EMI, Warner Music or any of the big labels. There was a real antipathy at the time towards the industry and the punk movement was probably a way of showing two fingers to the music establishment. That is my recollection of my music collection when I was growing up. My worst indulgence was buying really dodgy reproductions on O'Connell Bridge. In fact, the first time I heard a Van Morrison track - I could barely hear it - was from a tape I bought there. However, it led me to buy almost everything Van Morrison ever did through legal means.

There was always a cat and mouse game within the music industry in terms of how one could get the original recording cheaply or for nothing. Historically, there were always attempts to be independent in making, recording and distributing music. Some of the best and most exciting and enduring music I heard came from labels that have long since been bought out or gone to the great rock and roll gig in the sky. However, there was a basic belief copyright was important and a sense that when one was not buying a copyrighted piece of material, one was at least in the twilight zone and, if one was honest, one would acknowledge that one was doing something wrong which was damaging to the person who had produced the music.

One of my albums is "Ghostown" by the Radiators from Space. It is a fantastic, classic Irish album. It is about dismal Dublin in 1980 and 1981 when the recession had really taken hold in the country. What is striking about current times is the desperate ongoing search which I believe will bear fruit for ways out of the recession. What did we do in the early 1980s? It was about adding value to our food production, financial services and finding new ways in which Ireland could trade with the world and add value to its land resources. We were very clever in some of what we did. Everything did not work, but much of it did. Eventually, once we had the public finances in order somewhat later, we traded our way out of it and this became a modern economy, rather than an agrarian one that was under-selling itself in terms of what it produced.

Something similar is happening now. It is about finding the new areas in which we will trade successfully. It is an ongoing process. It is hard to say when the new digital economy began to work for Ireland. I cannot think of the seminal moment but perhaps somebody else can. However, unless we get our intellectual property protection system right, the perception will grow that Ireland is not a safe place in which to develop intellectual property such as games, software, music, film and so forth. There is a serious lacuna in our law which would allow, for example, an employee to walk out of his or her office and share a file that could travel around the world almost instantly, given the speed of modern communications. Removal is simply not a sufficiently fast response to such an action. There is an urgency in regard to the Attorney General's advice which we have all identified; Senator Cassidy did so in a particularly passionate way. There is an immediate need to address this gap. The judgment of Justice Charleton identifies the serious inadequacies in copyright law.

I spoke about the uneasy relationship between copyright and those who sought to avoid it. However, there has been a huge shift because it is now the cultural norm not to buy but to share or download material for free. The response of the record industry has at times been ham-fisted but at other times very clever. I have in mind the group Radiohead which offered an album online and one could pay what one wished for it. It worked for Radiohead, but it does not work for most of the smaller bands and artists who are trying to sell intellectual property on the Internet. I should declare an interest in this regard as I work with many young bands. They are free downloaders and file sharers until it comes to releasing their own album when they become extremely careful to ensure the copyright is writ large on the compact disc sleeve.

They understand they have ownership rights and a right to remuneration for the product which they have gone to trouble and expense to produce and into which they have put their creative energy.

There is a significant cultural challenge and ambivalence around this area and in that context, any kind of legal signal can be either damaging or helpful. That is the reason that the weekend after the IRMA-UPC decision was given, the message went out that it was okay to download and that it was legal. I understand there was a significant spike in download traffic the following weekend when the industry did its measurement. Apparently, the industry takes its measurements when young people are most likely to be downloading, generally between particular hours at weekends, so that it has an accurate measurement of traffic. The signal given out by that decision, although inaccurate and at odds with the substance of what Mr. Justice Charleton said, was that it was okay to download and people responded accordingly.

The situation needs to change. As Senator Cassidy said, the advice of the Attorney General is urgently needed and it should be rapidly followed by a statutory instrument that will give the State some way of addressing and tackling the issue. It is unfortunate that we are now coming into the period of the year when sales are most likely to spike. This will be followed by a barren period. Even at this stage, a message from the Attorney General would be helpful and would provide a clear message that this downloading is illegal and that artists have a right to remuneration for what they produce.

Much of what has been said here summarises my thoughts on this matter. However, I stress again the urgency of the situation and the need for the industry to play its part, although it should not use mechanisms it might acquire to deal with the issue in a heavy-handed way. By and large, the 675,000 people who engage in downloading illegally see it as a normal behaviour. That needs to be challenged and stopped, but not through enforcement in each individual case but through the Internet service provider being compelled, on foot of an injunction, to block or divert attempts to download. This would be a more suitable response to the illegal trafficking of files.

I remind the Minister of State that time is of the essence. The message must be made clear and the cultural challenge is of particular significance in that regard.