Editorial/Opinion
New canons to protect copyright in a changing world
By h.b.
Jun 23, 2006 - 8:22 AM

EDITORIAL COMMENT - On Thursday, Congress approved the changes to the intellectual property laws in Spain – copyright laws if you will. The idea is that a small canon will have to be paid on every blank media – from a blank CD to mobile phones and even a memory stick. However, computer hard disks and ADSL lines have, for some reason been left out of the legislation, despite their widespread use for illegal copying of music and films. Somehow the money collected in the new canon will then be paid back to the owner of the copyright.

The law is quite obviously a botched job, but a better solution is yet to be put forward. Protestors claim that we will all be paying the canon, even if we don’t use the blank material to make a copy of copyright material. And then there are the CD’s and DVD’s which have some sort of copy protection system, and so we can’t copy anyway, even though we have to still pay the canon.

For some time there has been quite a lot of publicity about the extent of how we all download or copy music, but some recent statistics have really taken the matter to new levels.

Telefonica has been looking at who and what is using most of the bandwidth of its infrastructure and now 90% of it is internet traffic using I.P protocols. Five years ago that number was just 15%. So the usual phone calls are just 10% of the system usage. As if that is not amazing enough, break down the 90% that is the internet use and we find 8% is audio or video streaming, and emails – 11% is the usual browsing of the Internet, but a massive 71% of the total is P2P traffic. That is peer to peer – direct connections between two computers and that means file sharing and the direct copying of audio or video files. The numbers also reveal that 30% of the users are taking up 90% of the bandwith – ie some of us are really using a lot of the stuff.