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Devil's Advocate: ID cards - another reason to protest
Now the record labels want our data...

By Martin Brampton

Published: Tuesday 29 November 2005

Martin Brampton weighs in against national ID cards in the UK once again - this time because the music industry appears to be getting involved.

It was not my intention to return to the issue of ID cards so soon. But despite my cynicism I was a little shocked to find that at this early stage there are already plans to use government data for dubious commercial purposes.

It is difficult not to recap the arguments in the following terms. The UK government is keen to foist expensive ID cards on an unwilling populace. In order to achieve this dubious goal, there has to be much talk of terrorism and personal danger. However, Stella Rimington, former head of MI5, asserts quite categorically that ID cards will be no use at all against terrorist attacks unless they are immune to forgery.

The government talks glowingly of biometric checks but glosses over the significant failure rate. It hedges on questions of forgery and appears to be pushing some of the costs into other projects, such as passports. So far, it declines to subject its ideas to independent critical review. The history of government IT projects of this scale makes cost overrun a near certainty.

Now, along comes the music industry with its own suggestion for all that data the government has gathered on the pretext of combating terrorism. The idea is that government data should be released to the industry, so that it can more zealously pursue people it believes have exceeded its own rapacious view of rights to music.

It is bizarre that it is called 'the music industry' at all. Part of the background to the argument is the constant refrain that suggests the industry is the provider of musical entertainment. Yet this is a gross distortion. Were they alive today, Bach and Mozart would not count as part of 'the music industry'. Nor do the great orchestras count as part of 'the music industry'. In popular music, while some performers attain riches, there are numerous accounts of contracts that transferred almost all their rights to the record label.

The music industry is part of the wider entertainment industry. This is the group that attempted to prevent video recorders from being manufactured. It is the industry that accuses people of piracy when they make personal copies of material they have purchased. It demands a levy on blank recording media on the assumption that you must be buying them for illicit purposes.

Great classical composers would have had a hard time in this environment. Bach was an avid collector of music written by others. He would write out copies of pieces that he acquired. He would perform them, modify them and incorporate ideas from them into his own music. Where he could not secure a copy of a piece, he could write down a lot of it just from a single hearing. Yet who would deny that he was a creative musical genius?

All the same, given its craven attitude to corporate pressure on every aspect of so-called intellectual property rights, what confidence can there be that government will resist the music industry's latest requests? While the much vaunted theory is of a free market where companies have to struggle for consumers' favours, the reality is all too often a rush to mechanisms of control that guarantee that we docilely bow to the demands of businesses.

It is all too clear that protestations by government that data gathered from citizens will not be misused cannot be trusted. Such is the enthusiasm of politicians to organise our lives that we cannot rely on party politics to deliver us from a society where our every move is tracked for the benefit of rich and powerful pressure groups. All we can do is protest as loudly as we may against moves such as ID cards.