High profile members of the music industry including surviving Who members Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend, Robert Plant and Queen guitarist Brian May have put their names to a letter published today by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) which urges the UK government to do more to curb illegal online downloading.
The letter asks for anti-piracy laws drawn up in the 2010 Digital Economy Act to be implemented before the planned date of 2014, and also singles out Google for not doing enough to remove sites which promote piracy from being removed from their search results.
“Once we’ve told Google 100,000 times that a particular site is illegal, we don’t think that site should be coming above iTunes and Spotify in the results,” Geoff Taylor, Chief Executive of the BPI, told BBC’s Newsnight programme last week.
Also on the programme was Google’s UK Policy Manager Theo Bertram, who contended that: “It’s not for Google to go around the web judging what is or isn’t legal, and I don’t think people would want us to do that. When people tell us, that’s my content on that page, we remove it quickly, and we do almost two million of those every month.”