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Rory Cellan-Jones

Can a charity make file-sharing taboo?

  • Rory Cellan-Jones
  • 30 Apr 08, 14:57 GMT

Laura, aged 17, has seen the error of her ways. "I used to use Limewire but didn't realise it was wrong and my parents didn't know what I was doing." For those who don't know, Limewire is a file-sharing application widely used by teenagers to share music.

Now, though, a children's charity is that downloading music can be both illegal and unsafe, and in its press release it quotes Laura in support of that message.

Boy listens to musicThe charity concerned is , which campaigns to improve internet safety. It is sending a leaflet to schools, colleges and record shops in 21 countries with the aim of helping teachers and parents to encourage young people to " and legally to download music."

The message can be boiled down to "Limewire - bad, iTunes - good" although it doesn't use those exact words.

The campaign is backed - and funded - by the music industry and it looks like a clever new tactic in what has so far been a pretty unsuccessful campaign to change the behaviour of young music fans. , they've of persistent file-sharers - but a "hearts and minds" campaign fronted by a charity must have a better chance of success. Or will it?

It may be too late to change the behaviour of a generation which has grown up with the idea that music is free. The other day I asked the teenage children of a friend how much music they downloaded. "Oh I'm always trying new stuff," one said. "Yeah, hundreds of tracks in the last six months," the other chipped in.

And how much did they buy? They looked at me as I was mad. "No, we get them off Limewire," came the reply. And they're not unusual - Childnet itself points to figures suggesting a third of young people across Europe now use file-sharing sites to swap music - a far higher proportion than use the likes of iTunes.

And while parents may worry about some of the dangers their children face online, is there any evidence that the legality of music downloads is amongst their major concerns? A child caught shoplifting from a record store would be seen as a source of shame to many a family - but I don't get the impression that many would feel embarrassed to admit that junior was indulging in a little light file-sharing upstairs in his bedroom.

The music industry has spent the last decade pushing the message that file-sharing is akin to theft. Now it has the backing of a respected charity. But will there be thousands more Lauras, giving up file-sharing and paying for their downloads? Don't bet on it.

Darren Waters

The best things in life are free

  • Darren Waters
  • 30 Apr 08, 14:10 GMT
CERN relinquishes all intellectual property rights to this code, both source and binary form and permission is granted for anyone to use, duplicate, modify and redistribute it.

With these words the world wide web was truly born. On 30 April 1993 the two directors of the Cern particle physics lab, W Hoogland and H Weber, that made the web free to use, adapt, change, grow and develop.

It was a remarkable decision. It turned the internet from a physical network of computers into a practical tool for sharing because finally there was simple data management system which made it easy to connect to and share information across machines.

Jack Schofield over at the Guardian, for doing "web birthday" pieces. But he's missing the point somewhat.

This is about a seemingly simple decision which transformed the fortunes of the net.

As Robert Cailliau who worked at Cern told me: "We had to convince them that this was going to take off and it was a really big thing. And therefore Cern couldn't hold on to it and the best thing to do was to give it away."

Without a free web, he said, "we would have had some sort of market share alongside services like AOL and Compuserve, but we would not have flattened the world".

I think that decision is worth noting.

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