The Stage

Lloyd Webber warns online piracy will cost industry £1.2bn

Published Friday 3 April 2009 at 17:27 by Lalayn Baluch

Andrew Lloyd Webber has warned the government that its failure to tackle online piracy will result in “cataclysmic consequences” for the creative industries.

Speaking at the House of Lords, the composer, producer and Tory peer revealed that the music sector looked set to lose a projected £1.2 billion within a six-year period between 2007 and 2012 because of online copyright infringements, as well as 30,000 UK jobs - not including performers and composers who could lose their livelihood and stop creating as a result.

Lloyd Webber said the music industry was being ‘eroded’ by illegal activity online, and that it had lost £180 million because of internet piracy in 2008 alone.

He called on the government to help safeguard the future of the creative industries before it is too late.

“The question that occurs to me is whether in ten years’ time Britain will be a place from which, say, the Beatles could have emerged? Will Britain be a fertile environment for all creative talent? Will Britain be a place where music, TV, film, games and publishing companies are sufficiently healthy to invest in British creative talent and take it to the rest of the world?

“No, not when there are no longer shops selling physical products and when the internet has become a sort of Somalia of unregulated theft and piracy,” Lloyd Webber warned.

He also lambasted internet service providers, saying that they “feed off and undermine” the creative economies.

The peer urged the government to start regulating ISPs and encourage them to be more active in tackling copyright infringements, rather than expecting rights-holders to undertake the expensive and unpopular task of seeking prosecutions against individuals.

Lloyd Webber added: “Britain’s creative industries are not content providers for broadband. They are the experiences that bring consumers to the internet in the first place and they can only survive in a safe internet world. Lawlessness is not a model for any society and it cannot be a model for our digital future.

“The cultural ‘free lunch’ is not free because film, music, printed media and so on cannot be produced, marketed and distributed for nothing. Investment must be rewarded and performers, composers and authors must be paid.”