The Australian start-up company TuneSecure says it has a new technology to hamper illegal downloads of popular music. The Aussies believe that they can push music piracy back towards a marginal and underground existance. To their surprise, record labels are not really ligning up to join them. Is the entertainment industry of Australia tired of trying to stop piracy?

James Erwin, technical director of TuneSecure, says his software crawls the internet for every instance of file-sharing and compiles the data to be used to take action against offenders. "Every time somebody logs on to a P2P network, does a search and then downloads an album that is protected — the IP network is exposed," he told news.com.au. 

Mr Erwin said the program can also target file locker websites used by the internet community to store songs and albums. "We can find protected artists and albums on these particular services and request to have them removed, as well as constantly monitor the source in case somebody decides to upload the same album again," he said.

Despite the potential of this new product, TuneSecure has not received a great deal of support from the Australian entertainment sector. 

Tim Levinson, manager of record company Elefant Traks does not think this kind of tracking software is the way his sector should go. He thinks many record companies couldn't be trusted with software that allowed them to pinpoint culprits. “I don't believe that the music industry is not wanting to go after regular people" he said. "That’s exactly the people they will be going after, the same as they have been doing for the last ten years." Surely, record companies have a point, it's just that the approach isn't winning people over. “It always makes the music industry look really bad."

Mr. Erwin emphasized the software is not designed to persecute everyday users. TuneSecure does not aim to stop downloading by tracking and shaming individual consumers "That’s the last thing we want to do. We want to tackle it at the source and using our tools and a bit of data that we can provide and assist record labels with finding where it originates from."

However software such as TuneSecure may be too little too late for record labels who have been adapting to the reality of piracy for more than a decade.

Veteran music journalist and radio presenter Stuart Coupe said instead of trying to combat music piracy, record labels should be trying to integrate it into creative business models. "The whole notion of the music industry has changed so dramatically in the last couple of years, I'm honestly, incredibly cynical about the ability of any structure or setup to stop illegal music downloading." He thinks the issue is how the 'music industry' can come to terms with the reality and starts being creative and forward thinking in terms of innovative business models.

Mr Coupe, who runs his own label Laughing Outlaw Records, proudly admits to downloading pirated music and openly encourages his artists to give samples of their music away for free. "If people don’t like those five tunes, they were never going to buy the other seven anyway. Don’t worry about it. Let people have it. Build up a fan base."

A similar strategy is being tried around the world. Popular bands Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead made headlines when they offered new records online for free, or for whatever the listener decided to pay.

Despite these signals that many artists are ‘moving on’ to experiment with different ways to market their music, anti-piracy groups continue to focus on the extermination of illegal downloading.

The Australian anti-piracy crusaders Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI) said "It may well be that TuneSecure have developed something better than what we have. We'd certainly be welcoming of any technology that would enhance our capabilities to engage in those activities."

However Mr Coupe believes that going after pirates will prove to be too big a task in the future."They capture one boat and close it down, but the pirates will find another boat."

Source: news.com.au