Sat Jan 2, 10:42 pm ET
WASHINGTON (AFP) Irish rock star Bono called Sunday for tougher controls over
the spread of intellectual property over the Internet, arguing that file
swiping and sharing hurt creators of cultural products.
"The only thing protecting the movie and TV industries from the fate that has
befallen music and indeed the newspaper business is the size of the files," the
lead singer of the band U2 wrote in an op-ed piece in The New York Times.
He pointed out that "the immutable laws of bandwidth" indicate that technology
is just a few years from allowing viewers to download entire movies in just a
few seconds.
"A decade?s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the
people it hurts are the creators -- in this case, the young, fledgling
songwriters who can?t live off ticket and T-shirt sales like the least
sympathetic among us," Bono noted.
The singer pointed out that the US effort to stop child pornography and China?s
effort to suppress online dissent indicate that it is "perfectly possible to
track" Internet content.
"Perhaps movie moguls will succeed where musicians and their moguls have failed
so far, and rally America to defend the most creative economy in the world,
where music, film, TV and video games help to account for nearly four percent
of gross domestic product," Bono said.