When an accident occurred during an F1 Grand Prix, Murray Walker, the motor racing commentator would sometimes tell the audience “we can’t see what’s happened from where we’re sat.” The reason Walker could not tell who came off at turn 11 of the Hungaroring is that he was in a BBC studio in England, watching the same television pictures as everyone else. Therein lies the irony of sports commentary. The purpose is to tell you what is happening. Apart from when listening on the radio, the same goal can be realized by using your own eyes. But watching television sport without commentary is like watching a modern-day movie made in black and white. Some people will never overcome that gnawing feeling that something is missing.

For the most popular sports, commentary has expanded exponentially. The commentator, once the lynchpin of television sports presentation, is now a bit part player. Time was that you used to only hear commentary, talk about events as they happen. Now every major sport is immersed in talk about what will happen before it does, and talk about why it happened after. Commentary is submerged in punditry. When once a retired footballer would buy a pub and serve stale beer to his hangers-on, he now learns to wear a tie with an enormous knot, gets media training, and reinvents himself as a television personality.

As a consequence of the shift from talking about events as they happen, to just talking, the entrance qualifications for talking about sport have changed. It used to be necessary to be good at talking, specifically at continuously something interesting and coherent in response to changing events. Now, the major qualification is to have once been a sportsperson. The idea is that having been a sportsperson, you have some special insight on the events. That may be true to a point, but most sports people are individuals with exceptional gifts of strength, stamina, speed, balance and agility. That does not mean they have two brain cells to rub together, had the foggiest idea what they were doing, why they were good at it, or the least bit of ability to explain it to others. Thanks to this trend, it is not unusual to hear halftime conversations that go something like the following…

Steve: Gary, do you think the blues will be happy coming in one-nil up?

Gary: Yes, Steve. But they’d have been happier to be two-nil up, no doubt about it.

Steve: It’s been one of those halves where the team on top is the one that takes its chances.

Gary: You’ve got to take your chances when you’re playing at this level. Albion didn’t take their chances. The blues did take their chance. The funny thing was that the lad took what was the hardest of the chances he had, after missing three or four easy ones.

Steve: Once again, it all comes down to taking your chances…

Gary: It does, Steve. And not just chances but half-chances. Sometimes you don’t even get a chance, so you’ve got to take your half-chances too.

Steve: And Albion didn’t make many chances.

Gary: No. To make chances you’ve got to take a chance or two. They’re sending in balls from deep and the defenders will gobble them up all day and night. The blues are working hard and they’re making it hard for Albion and that’s what we saw right from the kick-off, right up to when the ref blew his whistle and they came in for halftime. To be fair to Albion, the blues have played with two solid lines of four in defence and midfield, and they’ve not let Albion have a chance in this game.

Steve: Albion have shown they can make chances in their other games.

Gary: They have, and I’m sure that’s what the gaffer is telling the boys right now. The final ball’s let them down, but with the chances they’ve made in other games, you’ve got to back them to score sooner or later. But at this rate, it might not be today. Saying that, we’ve seen games like this turn in an instant and like the great Brian Clough used to say: it only takes a second to score a goal. Another goal, from either side, will definitely change the game.

Steve: What else do you think the manager’s telling Albion in their halftime talk?

Gary: I think he’s probably saying that there’s no need to panic. They’ve got forty-five minutes to come back. They need to be patient and find a way to inject some more urgency in their passing and overall play. They’ve not been the top team so far, but even the bottom team can be the top team on any given day in this league. We’ve seen it many times before, but I’d be surprised if we see it today. The main thing is they need to score first to get back into the game.

Steve: If they go two down, it’ll be a mountain to climb back.

Gary: That’s right Steve. They’ve done well for a newly-promoted team, but they really need to score first to stand a chance in the second half. If they go two down then you’ve got to think they’re out of it. But with the goalscorers they’ve got, they can never be ruled out completely.

Steve: Is it too soon to make a change?

Gary: I don’t think they need to make a change. The young lad on the wing is causing them problems when he runs at his opposite number. He just needs better delivery into the box. The strikers aren’t getting fed and if you don’t feed them they become invisible. There was a ten minute spell when the guys upfront looked bright and seemed to be getting on the front foot but the rest of the time they’ve not got their foot on the ball and that’s why they can’t get a foothold in this game.

Steve: That’s the game of football for you. Now what about the referee - is he having a good game?

Gary: There’s been some tackles flying in which makes it hard but he’s keeping the game flowing which the fans like to see.

Steve: And the penalty shout?

Gary: Definitely not a penalty. He won the ball cleanly and the lad went over too easy for my liking. If you’re going to criticize the ref you have to question why he didn’t give a yellow card for simulation. This ref never tends to hand out many cards unlike other refs, which I like to see, but makes the players very confused. The players are crying out for more consistency. That’s all that anyone can ask from the men in black. If a player falls that dramatically in the box, and it’s not a penalty, you’ve got to card him. We’ve seen them given in other games and it’s the lack of consistency that makes it hard for players to tell what are the rules on pretending to be fouled in the box. They just want to know what the rules are and if they’re allowed to pretend to be fouled in order to win a penalty decision. The refs really need to sit down together and decide what the rule’s supposed to be so players know where they stand when falling over in the penalty area.

Steve: Do you think they might throw on Hobson, who’s not played for six weeks but is fit enough to sit on the bench?

Gary: Hobson gives them something different. The question is his sharpness. Without playing he won’t be sharp but you don’t get sharp unless you’re playing. I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t come on until the last ten minutes, especially if they’re still down.

Steve: And what do you think of the blues’ new signing, the lad Kinzamann from Kaiserslautern?

Gary: He came here with a big reputation but I’m disappointed, to be honest. It looks like he’s struggling to keep up with the pace of an English derby game. This isn’t a derby game but it’s as good as a derby game.

Steve: I think the teams are about thirty-five miles apart. It’s not technically a derby game, but I know what you mean. It’s just like a derby game with everyone running around at a hundred miles an hour. And Albion would only have spent a half hour on the team coach, coming down the motorway this morning.

Gary: There’s a lot of huff and puff. There’s a lot of commitment on show. Typical English game with everyone diving in, hard tackles and no time on the ball. It’s what makes our football so entertaining to watch. Some of these new foreign players struggle to adjust to the pace when they first arrive. But the lad Kinzamann had that moment early on when he showed he’s got some silky skills, so I’m hoping he’ll be better in the second half.

Steve: Would either team be satisfied with a draw?

Gary: I don’t think so. This game’s a six-pointer. If it’s a draw, then the teams only get two points between them and that means they’ve both lost a potential four points. Even at this stage of the season, you can’t afford to drop four points in a single game.

Steve: Every game counts.

Gary: It does. There’s thirty-eight games in a season, not ten games or six games or twelve games but thirty-eight games in a season. And that’s not counting cup competitions. I think they’ll both be glad that they’re not in Europe which would mean even more games.

Steve: This league’s a marathon.

Gary: Exactly. These days, football is literally a marathon. That’s what makes the result in every single game so much more important. That’s why they’re playing this league game like it’s a cup game. In the league what matters is how many games you win and how many you draw. You can’t afford too many loses so you’ve got to aim to win every game, especially these games because you can’t expect to win against the top four. But with the blues at home, they know they’ve got to beat a side like Albion to stay up, and so far they are beating them which is all the fans can ask for.

Steve: The game might be unlocked by that little bit of skill or a mistake in the last ten minutes.

Gary: If the game is still one-nil going into the final ten minutes, then what happens in those ten minutes could definitely change the result in a big way. And then there’s stoppage time too.

Steve: So they’ll both be trying to win.

Gary: I’d bet my shirt on it.

Steve: And it looks like an expensive shirt too.

Gary: [Laughs] Thanks Steve.

It is tempting to denigrate the low end of punditry, but the high end of pre and post match analysis is now supported by an extraordinary array of technology. Pundits like Andy Gray of Sky’s Football coverage, and John Madden when talking about American Football, are now supported by gizmos that make even Bill Gates drool with envy. They have chalkboards, replays, hawkeyes, highlighters, snickometers, speed measurers and even computer simulations to help explain such basic things as how one team managed to score despite the best efforts of the other team to stop them. The investment in technology is so impressive, you have to assume there has been a knock-on stimulus to other sectors, in the same way that the space race resulted in teflon pans and pens that write upside down. Right now you imagine there is an American general somewhere in Afghanistan, marking on a touch sensitive screen the plans for how his team of troopers will make a touchdown run into Al Qaeda’s endzone.

Whilst some pundits have masterful analytical skills of a kind that were sorely lacking at Lehmann Brothers, the average pundit has descended to the level of former sports stars who can be trusted to dress smartly, speak coherently and avoid getting drunk until the show has finished. But then, they did let Gazza have a go at it, so even those expectations are not universal. More and more televised football games has created such a vacuum for former footballers that even Stan Collymore gets to share his insights with the rest of us. If even can talk sense about football, perhaps he should have told himself to score more goals during those long years of underachievement out on the pitch.

Journalists have been frozen out and their skills are no longer needed in front of camera, thanks to the seemingly endless rise of the professional sportsperson and amateur personality. The idea that being good at a sport is correlated to being knowledgeable or understanding a sport is laughable, as demonstrated by the modest playing careers of coaches Arsène Wenger and José Mourinho. That makes no difference to the television producers, who want stars with name recognition. Knowing what you are talking about is a secondary consideration. The problem for the stars is that they must eventually wane, and make room for the more recently retired. Only an organization like the BBC has the charity to keep Garth Crooks in work, and former footballer and pundit Gavin Peacock saw the writing on the wall and decided to pursue a higher calling, studying divinity and training for his new vocation with the church. As they get older, the bigger stars realize that anecdotes about their old sport and old chums tend to age as well as George Best’s liver. Lineker had the sense to diversify the range of sports shows he hosted, and Ian Wright diversified into mainstream light entertainment. Amidst all the hard-headed business nous, there is less of the engaging whimsy and eccentricity that makes Peter Alliss the Wogan of golf or made Murray Walker the Norman Wisdom of motorsports.

Occasionally, though, sheer numbers will deliver an unusual new flavour amidst the rotten apples that dominate punditry. When Mark Lawrenson reformed his double act with Alan Hansen, migrated from the centreback pairing of Anfield to the sofa pairing of Match of the Day, he seemed like Hansen-lite in every respect. Most of the time he made crappy self-indulgent chit chat about historical episodes in his life and those of the fellow players around him. Entertaining this may be, but relevant to presenting sporting highlights, it is not. Lawro’s witticisms were reminiscent of Richard Whiteley on a bad day. But as the anecdotes have run out, a new Lawrenson has emerged so seamlessly that it is impossible to identify where the transition began.

I first noticed the new Lawrenson when he was moved from the comfort of the studio settee to being the live commentary sidekick of John Motson. Normally sidekicks are there to pick up the slack with some knowing insights when the principal commenter needs a respite or someone to bounce off, or when the action lulls. They barely need to watch the game, and only need to come out with all those staple clichés that can only be excused because the former player has been there and done that. Lawrenson’s approach was radically different. He watched the game and talked about it. And he really did watch it. Whilst the normal viewer is befuddled why Motson is clueless about the events on the pitch (’the ref’s blown the whistle, I’m not sure what for…’) Lawrenson would know perfectly what was going on (’the ball flicked up off the midfielder’s heel and it struck the right back on the hand’). On top that, after all the lazy self-indulgent matey chat in the studio, putting Lawrenson next to Motson, and making Lawro talk about real events in a crisp manner as they unfold, has revealed a command of language at least the equal of the Scouse defender’s command of the offside trap. Lawro not only knows what the word ‘perfunctory’ means, something that cannot be said of many professional and university-educated people, but he is unafraid to use it. On returning to the sofa, Lawrenson has now cut the smalltalk, let the vocabulary off the leash, and found the way to weld information to entertainment. At one time, Lawrenson made even Ian Wright seem profound. Lawrenson is now the Hemmingway of pundits, except with added quips. Which goes to show that sports punditry, like so many other things, can sometimes be a game of two halves.

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George Orwell wrote about Salvador Dali:

“One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, ‘This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman.’ Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.”

In recent weeks, I have been struck by an analogy. Professional musicians are turning into new miners. I do not mean that they squeeze into dark holes and come out all sweaty and dirty, though I am sure plenty of them do. I mean that they are embarking on a great struggle, but one I think they have no hope of winning.

Twenty-five years ago, the coalminers of Britain’s National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) went on strike. They fought bitterly and they were desperate, but ultimately the strike ended in shattering defeat. They were not without popular support. Pictures of Police brutally clashing with pickets gained them favour, though this was balanced by stories of the harassment meted out to the strikebreakers who went back to work. In the public consciousness, the miners were defeated by an implacable opponent: Prime minister Margaret Thatcher. In the Ridley Plan, her colleagues had already outlined some of the essential steps to be successful when faced by a national strike by the coalminers. These included building up stocks of coal in advance and contingency planning for the import of coal at short notice. There was no doubt that the easiest way to envision the strike was as a battle of wills between Thatcher and the NUM’s leader, Arthur Scargill. The reality, though, is a little subtler.

Thatcher made vital decisions that allowed her to successfully confront the miners, instead of caving in to their demands for fear of power cuts, but she also had more powerful forces on her side: the tide of economic necessity. Put simply, British coal was more expensive than other fuels available for power generation. Cutting the cost of national subsidies would make it easier for Thatcher to cut taxes. Cutting the cost of electricity bills would reduce the cost of living and hence also buy her support. In a democracy, a major national strike needs to be seen in terms of overall imperatives. A politician that delivers power cuts is unlikely to maintain popular support, but a politician that delivers reduced taxes and reduced household bills is likely to gain support. It is a simple equation, but no less valid for its simplicity. Thatcher made a political calculation, and it paid off for her. In contrast, Scargill made the wrong calculation, and the cost of that error was the subsequently more vicious dismemberment of the British coal industry.

Recording artists are embarking on a similar crusade to that of the miners. Like miners, they have long depended on the state’s institutions. They do not work for a nationalized industry like the coalminers did, but they do rely upon an economic model that needs to be upheld by laws that are especially favourable to them. For most of the population, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but that flattery is the only recompense available when the product of your mind is copied by someone else. Most ideas cannot be patented, or copyrighted, or trademarked, or protected in any other way. Though it is called intellectual property, the ‘intellectual’ element of such property is very narrowly defined, so that there can be a useful test and way to enforce laws that control who can exploit it for economic gain. If I copy an exact string of words I infringe copyright, but not if I relay the gist of a story. I break the law if I repeat a song note for note without giving the compensation due to the rights owner, but I do not break the law if I am inspired to write a similar song. This imbalance between the laws that govern exact copies and the absence of laws to govern similarity tends to favour people who already have wealth and power and can therefore have privileged access to distribution networks. The wealth and power of successful recording artists depends on a pillar maintained by the state, the institutions of law and order that govern what we may or may not do. Without copyright law, and the levers of the state necessary to enforce it, there would be no copyright infringement and no way to make money from owning copyright. But like the coalminers, there is an economic threat that musicians now face, and just like the miners, they are unwilling to do so. They have also slipped into the same trap as the miners, insisting that their fight is a moral one, when the truth is that the battleground is the economy.

The law only works if the great majority of people are willing to abide by it. The wonder of democracy is that we can replace governments without bloodletting, but even the worst tyrant can be overthrown. Authority for every law, every institution of the state, depends on the acceptance of the people. The horror of Orwell’s 1984 is that the state might penetrate not just into your home, but into your mind, in order to control you. We expect some things to be inviolable, including our own minds. That there are limits to law is a maxim. Where to draw those limits is a question of practicality as well as morality and economics. Like any other practicality, the answer to the question can change because of new circumstances. We find that through history, it is often morality that changes to suit practicality, and not the other way around. Nuclear stockpiles to kill every human are morally repugnant, but we can expect more and more nations to join the nuclear club for purely practical reasons, and the moral justification is always the same: “if them, why not us?” Cloning, slavery, education and child labour, pensions and the treatment of the elderly, democracy, feudalism, the role of women in the workplace - all have been the subject of moral debates and all of those debates are seen through the prism of what is practical at any given point in time. As practicalities change, so morality changes with it. Slavery for farming would be repugnant now, but is not so obviously repugnant in a time where there are no machines to bear the brunt of farming work. Expecting genteel ladies to work was also repugnant at one time, until the First World War made it essential to utilize every human resource at the nation’s disposal. The same is true of copyright, yet like the coalminers, the musicians are living in denial about the consequences for the economic model that rewards them for their work.

Just like nuclear proliferation, which we can abhor and try to delay but recognize as inevitable just because of the spread of technology, copyright abuse will inevitably increase. When copying involved taking a book and writing it out again in longhand, then there was no need for copyright law. Now that copying has been completely divorced from physicality, and that we live in a world with a globally connected network to share digital content, and there are people in the world with the nous to write software and implement solutions to solve problems they want to solve, copyright abuse is inevitable. Its abuse is inevitable thanks to the glorious hypocrisy in the heart of every human being: the belief that laws are there to protect them from other people, not there to stop them doing things they want to do. Everybody thinks like that, and no end of ‘education’ will stop people ’stealing’ music so long as they feel the cost of music on the free market is too high, and the damage done to the creative artist is little or none. Any very many people do feel like that. So whilst the economic imperatives are different to those that savaged the British coal industry - we are talking about ease of access for a limitless and free ‘black market’ in music, not the relative cost of extraction and the kilojoule content of coal versus gas - the economic imperatives exist and cannot be ignored.

The musicians, like the miners before them, are living in denial about economic change. One can sympathize. Nobody wants to believe that their chosen path has been invalidated by forces outside of their control. If you make a career decision in your teens, it will be painful to recognize that it was based on outdated economic assumptions by the time you reach your late twenties. A retreat to an argument for morality is as misguided as the miners believing they could successfully demand subsidies from the rest of society. In a way, they can, because they can try to make it so difficult to change that people put up with long-run inequity rather than a shorter period of more severe turbulence and trouble. The price of doing so is inequity; musicians are demanding to be raised up and protected by society that does not offer similar protections to everyone else. Plenty of ideas receive no legal protection. Copyright does. This inequity most of us would agree is tolerable. But that this inequity needs to be backed by surveillance is a demand too far. A law that cannot be enforced without spying on people in their homes is a law that belongs in Orwell’s Airstrip One, not a law that belongs in our Britain. And we know that copyright can no longer be effectively enforced without surveillance. That makes it a law that should not be enforced, because the morality of protecting the right of musicians to enjoy the economic benefits of their labour is outweighed by the morality of protecting all citizens from surveillance by authoritarian forces. If anything, the musician has become far more morally reprehensible than the miner ever was. The miner just expected to get paid more than the true value of the coal they produced, and if they do not get it, they would cut everybody’s electricity until the government backed down. Unfortunately for the miner, there were no power cuts and the strike went on far longer than the average miner could afford to live without pay. In contrast the musician expects not just the state, but unrelated businesses to pay the price for the surveillance they demand. And they do expect surveillance of everybody in the UK. Electronically monitoring who does what on a network is surveillance of everyone who uses it, no matter how much ignorance and subterfuge is offered by musicians in order to make it sound more reasonable.

One of the reasons to dislike Arthur Scargill, the leader of the NUM who lead their ill-fated strike, was his authoritarian tendencies. There is little doubt he was loved by many of his union’s members. He was seen as a man who worked hard for the cause of miners, was honest and faithful. But when he called for a national strike by coalminers, the NUM lacked the facility, or interest, to ballot its own members on whether they wanted to strike. Now I see Lily Allen in much the same light as Scargill. She has the same ability to inspire love and devotion in some, but suffers the same deficits when it comes to an excess of pride and a lack of humility. Allen is a would-be leader for the musicians, and for much of the rest of us. In recent weeks, she has been the most outspoken of the increasingly politicized fight to protect the economic interests of recording artists. What Allen lacks is an interest in listening to points of view that are different to her own. I have never met the woman, but I draw inferences from her behaviour. She started a blog to persuade people to her point of view, but tore it down after she received ‘abuse’, by which she means she did not like being pointed out as a hypocrite. Allen then went on a media rampage, threatening to quit music and appearing in The Sun to immodestly explain how she ‘understands the internet’, with the implication presumably being that anyone who disagrees with her must not really understand the internet, although there are many learned individuals from all walks - lawyers, academics and even musicians - who sincerely believe copyright is in desperate need of reform. This media blitz was cleverly and pointedly designed to distract attention from the revelation, made prominent on Michael Masnick’s Techdirt blog only hours earlier, that Allen had infringed the copyright of other musicians herself. When she was unknown and trying to get attention, she made ‘mixtapes’, digital music files that spliced her music with that of other artists, in the hope that they would be downloaded and help her to gain popularity. Embarrassingly for Allen, the mixtapes were still available for download on LilyAllenMusic.com, even whilst Ms. Allen was denouncing the evil of ’stealing’ from recording artists by abusing their copyright. When the hypocrisy was about to get mainstream press attention, the mixtapes were finally pulled from her website and she went into overdrive - talking about anything and everything except her own infringement of copyright laws that she now rather pompously considers to be sacrosanct.

If you want the proof of Lily Allen’s copyright infringement, I downloaded the files from LilyAllenMusic.com to ensure the evidence was never lost to the public domain. If you want, you can listen to Lily Allen’s mixtape1 and mixtape2. I know that by offering these files I am guilty of copyright infringement myself. The funny thing about morality is that sometimes the morally right thing is to break a law in order to highlight a greater moral wrong. I am not deaf to the pleas from celebrities to protect the interests of hard-up old session musicians, but I am cynical about them. And I am not persuaded that heralding an era of unprecedented spying on the private individual is a price worth paying to ensure the poorest musicians earn a little more money. A better solution to the poverty of some who work in the music industry would involve the richest musicians earning a whole lot less, but the music industry has been incapable of finding solutions like that. That makes them as selfish as much of the rest of humanity, including the people who want to download music for free.

To borrow from Orwell, one ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Lily Allen is an attractive artist with a talent for catchy songs, and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a musician is that he or she makes music. If it makes us want to whistle or dance, it is good music, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. Yet even the best celebrity in the world deserves to be pulled down if they use their celebrity to turn the internet into a prison camp. Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.

And Lily Allen is wrong about music dying. Music lived before copyright. It will live after copyright. People make music with no profit motive, even in these crazy materialistic times. Take a listen to this sensational song by Dan Bull, which rather amusingly analyses Lily Allen and her arguments…

When the US was a young nation, it was greedy to learn and to grow. A good example is Benjamin Franklin a famous polymath who experimented with electricity amongst other things. Benjamin Franklin was an innovator, but he also engaged in piracy. Franklin, like others, republished the works of 18th century British authors without giving them any reward in exchange for copying their words. As early as 1808, the poet William Wordsworth complained about exploitation and argued for copyright to be extended. The most popular novelist of the Victorian era, Charles Dickens, lobbied Congress during his North American speaking tours, protesting that the copyright of British authors should be recognized in the US. His pleas fell on deaf ears. America needed the wealth of new ideas and lacked libraries. For Americans to benefit from education and entertainment, so the argument went, necessitated cutting costs, and that meant not rewarding the British authors who should be satisfied with the rewards received elsewhere. And was not the success of Dickens’ tours a real demonstration that piracy helped authors, rather than hindering them? The argument went on to assert that Dickens benefited most from the enhancement of his reputation gained by the wide circulation of his work. Whether Dickens thought so or not, the Americans had decided this was worth more than profiting from the sale of fewer books bearing his name. Does that sound familiar? It should, because we hear the same debate today. The difference is that the tables have turned and now the US, like the other countries that have hoarded intellectual wealth, is concerned that its valuable copyrights are exploited by the greedy, growing, countries of the developing world.

Whilst the struggle for copyright is sometimes seen as a battle between nations, it is also a battle of will within national borders. The emergence of a political movement in European countries, the Pirate Party movement, tells us something about the strength of feeling across an increasingly polarized debate. Businesses pursue stringent fines for P2P filesharers. Governments enforce stricter laws to protect copyright. Citizens respond by forming new political parties and canvassing for votes. There is a Pirate Party in the US too, though the nature of American democracy makes it very unlikely they will break through and raise the profile of copyright reform. The frontline of the US copyright debate is the courtroom, not the ballot box. In contrast, the very existence of electoral alternatives has enabled European parties to secure valuable attention in mainstream media. In only the first month since being launched, the Pirate Party UK has secured room for the debate about copyright reform in every quality British newspaper, on television and radio, and of course all over the internet. All of this is encouraging for a party that wants people to freely exchange their thoughts, and is a signal that even in rich countries, many see the appeal of less stringent copyright.

The counterargument to copyright reform is that there will be losers. The losers are supposed to be those who create, or the losers will be all of us. The conclusion is that either the creators receive lesser rewards for their work, and so they will be poorer, or the creators will simply create less and will do other jobs instead, leaving us all poorer. But Dickens did not stop writing because of American exploitation of his words. If anything, he was inspired by it - inspired to respond via Martin Chuzzlewit. The same internet that enables instantaneous and mass duplication of copyright works has transformed many other markets. The internet enables middlemen to be stripped out of supply and distribution, and the benefits are passed on to the consumer through lower costs. Take this to its logical limit and you do end up with an extreme - the same extreme as Benjamin Franklin not sharing the profits from the works he pirated. But far from ending creation, piracy simply changes the market dynamics. One source of revenue is closed, not all sources. Dickens made money by speaking. Musicians can make money from live performances or merchandise. The copyrighted content stops being a marketable product and instead becomes the fulcrum for a kind of marketing. This marketing is all the more powerful because it is spread from individual to individual, and cannot be manipulated by business interests. In other words, people promote the content they like, not the content they are told to like, and all studies show that we trust the recommendations of friends and ordinary folks far more than we trust celebrity endorsements and slick corporate promotion. The evidence is that this peer-to-peer advertising is effective in creating new revenues. This is a threat to the jobs of some middlemen, who are paid to influence the market, but is a boon to consumers and puts market power and intelligence back into the hands of the people who should be dictating what is popular and what is not. The significance of the advertising effect of free content is demonstrated by the observed correlation that the most prolific downloaders of pirated content also spend the most to legitimately buy content.

With a marketplace in rapid transition, it can be hard to identify all the factors that cause it to happen. The digital marketplace for copyrighted content does more than increase the potential to freely copy works that were originally created with profit in mind. It also reduces barriers to entry. It reduces them so far, that, at the extreme, the marketplace collapses. People just give and take freely. This has been observed already with open source software. We see it with the rise in so-called ‘user-generated content’ on sites like YouTube. ‘User-generated’ is a euphemism for ‘not to be taken seriously because it does not have a big budget’. Thanks to the democratizing effect of other technological improvements, married to the free distribution mechanism of the internet, then all it takes to create a popular song is to possess a guitar and a microphone, without the need for a marketing budget. Beneath the veil of piracy, the real factor that drives down prices is the proliferation of competition, from small business, from micro business, from hobbyists and people who create for the pleasure of friends.

Resetting the marketplace so that many can produce for many will diminish some business models. It also creates new ones. If you cannot profit by controlling a much-sought copy of one work, perhaps you can profit by using the work to attract people to other goods and services, or by embedding the work within another product. The music industry has recognized this, and now seeks to make more from new activities like selling t-shirts with lyrics written on them. This is innovation in the true sense - instead of just creating variations on an established theme, the goal is to develop genuinely new kinds of products.

Supply and demand suggests that the money saved on certain kinds of products just gets spent on others. This is the basis of the real value proposition for any economy. Either it remains stagnant, and tries to protect existing business models, or it is open to change and incubates new business models. Copyright was created for an old business model, and not a very good one at that. Technology has moved on from the time when printing presses were expensive and distribution of content was physical. Many of us may love Mickey Mouse, but perpetually extending Disney’s copyright stifles creation instead of encouraging it. Nobody wants to see some poor session musician struggling to fight poverty in his old age, but that is no reason to rewrite the contract he agreed when he first did some work. We would not go back to a plumber, fifty years after he does a job, and agree to pay him more than was originally stipulated for the original job, just because we feel sorry for him. Let charity be charity and business be business, without confusing the two. If we do confuse the two, we are likely to forget that expenditure on entertainment is discretionary, meaning that if more goes to Disney’s millionaire execs, or to some poor old session musician, less will go to anyone new who wants to break into the market.

Governments that try to preserve existing business models by defending copyright are missing the point. Creative people now have few barriers of entry to a huge potential market. Artists will simply short-circuit big businesses, by selling direct to the consumer in the same way that insurance brokers were frozen out by the rise in direct sales of insurance policies. Some will give work away just to get the foothold of recognition. Unhappy that your publisher does not promote your work? Then give it away and bet that the audience will see talent where the publisher does not. Giving his work away made Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho successful. At the same time, discretionary spend on entertainment and education will still be spent on education and entertainment. That means new markets open up as others close. If people can get recorded music for free, then they have more money to spend on live performances. Or if they want something to enjoy at home, consumers will shift their spending from music to other content like video games, and this research suggests that is just what people have been doing. Seen in that context, it makes perfect sense for music businesses to change tack; if they cannot sell direct to the consumer, sell to the people who make games instead. This is innovation, and it is good for customers, even if painful for those businesses that lack the imagination or agility to keep pace with change.

Nations that have been great innovators face a risk. They have built up intangible wealth that will tempt some to simply sit back and exploit, instead of creating anew. To do so would be the worst mistake possible for the economy of not only rich nations, but of the world. Innovation, experimentation, change - these are the ways to keep on creating world-beating formulas. Monopolies of ideas are profitable only for those that control them. That means monopolies should not be allowed to live on longer than fairly required to recoup the initial investment that was needed to turn the idea into a reality. Money spent on enforcing and maintaining those monopolies for longer than needed is money not spent on developing alternative products. New capabilities inevitably give rise to new markets and these are the real and pervasive threat to old monopolies. The iPod allowed people to listen to as much music as they like, wherever they like, but it also gave birth to podcasting and a new world of creative opportunity. Listening to a free podcast means less time to listen to an album of music that you pay for. Sales of volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica collapsed in the face of rivals sold on CD-ROMs, and Wikipedia begs the question of why anyone should pay for reference texts. News services are happy to reuse the amateur’s view of major events, in the form of bystander photographs and videos, tweets and commentary from blogs. Such amateur content squeezes the market for professionals, but that does not mean amateur content should be prohibited or limited, or that the reader or viewer would be better informed by content that only came from professional sources.

Rich countries, like the US, got ahead by creating new ideas, not by just by exploiting them. And every nation has been greedy enough to exploit the ideas of others - when it suited them. Now, more than ever, piracy and the dissolution of barriers to entry mean new ideas have to be imagined and delivered at ever greater speed. You can try to slow the progress of competitors, but if that is all you do, they will still overtake you soon enough. Nations rich in intellectual capital should avoid the temptation to pour more and more resources into protecting its current intellectual assets. Intellectual assets only retain value if rivals lack the imagination to make something better. In a world where ideas are spread ever more easily, the dominance of a good idea will be shorter and shorter. The cleverest nations should stick to what they do best - investing in creating the future. If that means encouraging the next generation of Benjamin Franklins, that can only be a good thing.

Do you realize how much trouble can be caused when politicians get messed up with music? I am not talking about asking your local council leader to DJ your party, though that might be disastrous too. Politics showed its most foolish side in the US state of Oklahoma, with a brouhaha about selecting the official State Rock and Roll Song (their capital letters, not mine). Oklahomans are not short of official songs to represent their state, so you might think they must be pretty slick when it comes to approving a new one. They already have an official State Folk Song (“Oklahoma Hills”, Jack and Woody Guthrie, adopted 2001), and an official State Country and Western Song (“Faded Love”, Bob Wills, adopted 1988). Of course, they have long recognized the most pro-Oklahoma song any of us are ever likely to hear. Way back in 1953 they proclaimed the official State [Open Category] Song should be “Oklahoma”, the theme from the musical “Oklahoma” by Rodgers and Hammerstein. If you are not familiar with the song, it begins by bellowing the name “Oklahoma!” as loud as possible, and then rapidly listing a lot of reasons why Oklahoma is great, including the immortal lines:

And when we say Ay yippy yi ki yea,
We’re only saying:
You’re doin’ fine Oklahoma
Oklahoma you’re okay.

I doubt there was much controversy on the day in ‘53 when they picked that song. Returning to the present day, I imagine most people were surprised at the political ructions caused when the state’s citizens were asked to vote on what should be their official state rock and roll song (sorry, I meant official State Rock and Roll Song). The overwhelming winner was a mellow ditty called “Do You Realize??” by Oklahoma’s best known veteran oddball rockers, The Flaming Lips. Official confirmation seemed assured when the Oklahoman Senate unanimously endorsed the choice. But when the decision was sent to the Oklahoman House of Representatives to ratify, it failed to garner the 51 backers needed to pass the motion, with 39 Representatives deciding to vote against the song. What angered them so much? It was not the anodyne lyrics, which include such lines as:

Do You Realize - that you have the most beautiful face
Do You Realize - we’re floating in space

Apparently, some of the Oklahoman Representatives got upset with the bass player’s choice of apparel when observing the Senate’s vote. He wore a t-shirt with a hammer and sickle emblem, which some took to imply the band has communist sympathies. Others did not like that the lead singer apparently swore at a previous public event. That puts the important work of politicians into perspective, does it not? Are politicians there to sort out the big things, like crime, or healthcare or even keeping the streets clean? Or are they there to vote for or against an official state song (sorry, I meant official State Song) which was picked by the public, because they do not like what the band members wear and one naughty word they said?

I imagine most people outside of the US know pretty much nothing about Oklahoma. In addition to trivia about state songs (or should that be State Songs?) and The Flaming Lips, I only know three things about Oklahoma (and I have been there):

1. They have a big cattle market.

2. It is flat.

3. One of their public buildings was blown up by a terrorist. He killed 168 public workers because he had a grudge against government. The terrorist was of the white, Christian, American variety.

I was only in Oklahoma one night, but I did conclude that some Oklahomans must be as knowledgeable about the rest of the world as I am about Oklahoma. Whilst waiting for my car to be retrieved from the hotel garage, I engaged in a conversation with the hotel’s porter. He told me, without prompting, that he was intending to join a mission to bring God to the sinful continent of Europe. I will not dispute that Europe is full of sinners, but you think he might have found some sinners closer to home. Hopefully American evangelicals are now more aware of global warming and will soon restrict their missions to locations within the range of an electric car. When I told the porter that European sinners might not be susceptible to the persuasive skills of an Oklahoman teenager on his first journey outside his home state, he refused to be discouraged. The porter was still not discouraged even when I suggested Europeans who spoke English might consider themselves superior to him, and that the others would not comprehend his brand of monoglot oratory. He said he did not understand the last bit of that sentence, to which I replied: “hence inadvertently demonstrating my point on both counts”. He did not understand that either. Practicing what I myself was preaching, I gave up on discouraging him and instead asked him what he was doing about bad people in the USA. He agreed there were plenty, but told me all the evidence pointed towards there being a lot more bad people in Europe. I decided there was little value in asking about where he got his evidence from. Needless to say, I did not give him a tip.

It would be unfair to judge Oklahomans based on one conversation with a teenage hotel porter, just as it would be unfair to judge the worthiness of a song based on one errant fashion decision or a single slip of the tongue. The Gospel according to Matthew says that Jesus taught the following:

Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye’, when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.

Those are wise words, whatever your religion. If I understand them correctly, then I should not judge Oklahomans in general or the particular Oklahomans who sit in their House of Representatives. However, the words of Jesus are wise simply because people often are quick to judge one another. Some Oklahoman Representatives made some foolish judgments about a rather innocuous rock band. Did they realize how the story would be reproduced all around the world, and the negative publicity it would create for Oklahoma? Did they realize that, outside of the USA, more people are familiar with the back catalogue of three-time Grammy winners The Flaming Lips than they ever will be with any of the good work done by the people sitting in Oklahoma’s House of Representatives? Did they realize that, outside of the USA, and probably by most people in the USA, and probably even by most Oklahomans, their behaviour would be judged to be rather silly and backward? What should have been a minor attempt to garner good publicity for Oklahoma has turned into a bigger story about the foolishness of Oklahoman politicians. Luckily for the people who voted in the state poll, The Flaming Lips, and for lovers of music and democracy in general, the good news is that common sense will prevail. The Governor of Oklahoma has intervened to set things right. Governor Brad Henry has announced he will sign an executive order to make “Do You Realize??” the official State Rock and Roll Song. He said of The Flaming Lips:

A truly iconic rock’n'roll band, they are proud ambassadors of their home state. They were clearly the people’s choice, and I intend to honour that vote.

Perhaps once he has done that, he can get back to more important business. If you live nearby, you can show your support by heading down to the Oklahoma History Center on Tuesday at 2pm, when the Governor will be making it official. For everybody else, you can enjoy the pleasing words and music of Oklahoma’s new official State Rock and Roll Song by taking a look below. Enjoy.

These days, there is a plethora of lists. Wherever you find them - on television, in magazines, even on Amazon.com - they always reek of a lazy, self-serving, inexpensive mission to provoke utterly trivial debate. I dread the inevitable day when an independent production company makes a show called ‘The Top 100 Lists’, in which we will see ‘Top 100 Celebrity Catfights’ vying with ‘Top 100 Sporting Cock-ups’ for the ranking of most entertaining list of all time. The show should itself be hosted by the Top 5 of list presenters, which for me would involve:

5. Angus Deayton
4. David Letterman
3. Alan Carr
2. Jimmy Carr
1. A Ford Ka (with welded doors and Jeremy Clarkson trapped inside)

Listing is a disease. Just because Nick Hornby wrote some good books, it does not make his predilection for listing okay. Worse still, listing is infectious. Even when there are official rankings, people insist on debating their own unofficial rankings. Nature abhors a vacuum, and lists seem to be nature’s first choice for filling a vacuum with meaningless chatter. I once had a perfectly good game of snooker ruined by lists. Snooker is a quiet game, with no need for endless chatter. Part of the reason for going to a snooker hall is that it is one place where you can have a late night drink whilst enjoying some peace and quiet. However, my competitor insisted on repeatedly asking me how I would rank the top ten male tennis players in the world. Or the top ten female tennis players. Or the top ten racing car drivers of all time. Or the top ten root vegetables. After a while, I found myself contemplating the top ten methods of suicide. Then I reconsidered, and thought about the top ten methods for homicide. If my fellow player was intending to engender good conversation, he failed miserably. If he was trying to put me off my game, he succeeded wonderfully. No, it takes a brave and resolute man to resist the temptation to fill up useful space with useless lists. I am neither of those things, so here is the continuation and completion of the list I started last week: the top alternative British anthems.

10. Kaiser Chiefs - Never Miss a Beat

In their short careers so far, the Kaiser Chiefs have shown an uncanny ability to graft downbeat polemical poetry to upbeat post-punk. There were several songs that could have been on this list. ‘I Predict a Riot’ (Watching the people get lairy/ Is not very pretty I tell thee) characterized the claustrophobic feeling of being in a town spinning out of control. However, it was not very topical - they were no riots around the time of release (although if there were, chances are the song would have been shelved until a less controversial time). ‘The Angry Mob’ (We Are The Angry Mob/ We Read The Papers Everyday/ We Like Who Like/ We Hate Who He Hate/ But We’re Also Easily Swayed) carved through the hysteria that abounds in modern life. Even The Sun admitted it was “a clever, accessible pop song”. There are others too, but I am going to select the recent hit ‘Never Miss a Beat’. It perfectly captures the disenfranchised, disenchanted, and dystopian worldview of many young people, whilst speaking a language that could have been taken word-for-word from conversations held up and down Britain every day.

9. Billy Bragg - God’s Footballer

Sadly, I couldn’t find a link to this sublime song, part homage, part homily, about Peter Knowles (brother of better-known Cyril Knowles of Tottenham Hotspur). Peter Knowles gave up his football career at Wolverhampton Wanderers in order to devote himself to his religious beliefs. Bragg, in a beautiful folk tune, tells us the story of a man who “scores goals on a Saturday, and saves souls on a Sunday”. Without wanting to sound blasphemous, it is almost a hymn to the beautiful game, whilst still reminding us that there is more to life. The tune can be found on Bragg’s 1991 album, ‘Don’t Try This At Home’.

Bragg, an Essex boy well known for his punk, politics and protesting, has written several other songs that could have made this list. As I could not find a link to my preferred choice, I thought I might as well pick a better singer than Bragg as well. This video features Kirsty MacColl, doing her cover of Bragg’s ‘New England’. The line “it’s wrong to wish on space hardware” is alone enough to earn this song an honourable mention.

8. PJ Harvey - Sheela Na Gig

Despite rumours to the contrary, even Brits have sex. They just have their own, peculiarly British, way of being messed up about it. It takes a bold songwriter to thrust straight for the sexual jugular. PJ Harvey deserves double praise, not just for eviscerating the ambiguous and sometimes misogynistic British attitudes to female sexuality, but also by drawing upon a metaphor with historic and national connotations to do so. A Sheela Na Gig is a form of carving found on churches all over the British Isles. However, the carvings are not what you might expect to find on a church: they depict crouching women, holding their vulvas open for public display. The symbolism is perfect for a story about how some find female sexuality both compelling and repulsive at the same time.

7. Radiohead - Creep

I needed to find the male yang to PJ Harvey’s female yin. That was not easy. Where would I look for a song that offered an alternative view of British male sexuality? I was looking for a song that confirmed that the boys were no less screwed up about sex than the girls. The Smiths were already on my list, and they were more interested in romance than sex. Then I remembered one band who had done so much to change the soundscape. They made it possible for the Coldplays and Snow Patrols to become worldwide stars, but we should not hold that against them. And this song was such an enormous hit, it guaranteed they could do whatever they like with the rest of their career. The only question is whether it is British or not. Radiohead is British, but is this song? To be truthful, I cannot tell. Take a look at the video, which shows Radiohead’s performance at Glastonbury in 1997. The crowd, drenched from torrential rain during the two days beforehand, are not just part of a sing-a-long. They are part of a sing-a-longing. I was lucky enough to be there, at what some journo decided to list as one of the ‘top 10 Glastonbury performances’. Thinking about that place and time, my only answer is that ‘Creep’ is universal, and eternal (but I still want it in my list).

6. David Bowie - Life on Mars

Long before the BBC came along and cashed in on a song by naming a series after it, there was a song. The title, and melody, hint at the outer-worldly themes so common in Bowie’s music. The lyrics, in contrast, depict a brutal crushing reality, that provokes the subject into craving escape. Bowie paints a masterpiece in urban misery - look at those cavemen go… look at the law man beating on the wrong guy… Rule Britannia is out of bounds…

‘Life on Mars’ is perhaps the most British of all Bowie’s songs in terms of ethos. However, the history of the composition is international. In 1968, Bowie was asked to write English lyrics for a French song called ‘Comme D’Habitude’, but before Bowie’s version was released, Canadian songwriter Paul Anka acquired the rights to the music. He wrote his own English-language version, especially for one very particular star. The resulting recording was Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’. Bowie, disappointed on missing out, wrote ‘Life on Mars’ as semi-parody, semi-revenge. Bowie admits as much in this interview.

The songs have much in common, in terms of chords and melody. But whilst Sinatra’s hit was uniquely Sinatra and American, Bowie’s was uniquely Bowie - and British.

5. Elton John - Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)

Bowie was not alone when it came to singing about cavemen. Long before the Happy Mondays and their 24-hour party people celebration of debauchery, before Lily Allen decided it was cool to get drunk whilst handing out awards at ceremonies (see here), and before her dad had penned such memorable lyrics as ‘Eng-er-land’ and ‘Vind-er-loo’ (hmmm - I see a connection), Elton John and songwriting partner Bernie Taupin had come up with the ultimate in hooligan anthems. Everything else became an anti-climax the moment the lad Elton started banging on his joanna and belting out lyrics like: “a couple of the sounds that I really like/ Are the sounds of a switchblade and a motorbike/ I’m a juvenile product of the working class/ Whose best friend floats in the bottom of a glass”. He may be short, ugly, gay, balding, and getting on, but my money says the man born Reg Dwight would take the combined Allens in a fight - any place, any time (but especially on a Saturday night).

4. Arctic Monkeys - I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor

Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys has already marked himself as a songwriting talent that only comes along once in a generation. His songs resonate with stories mature beyond his years. They communicate an unsentimental realism, expressed in a vernacular that is defiant in its authenticity. Having written so many good songs already, it was hard to choose which one to include here. Listen again to their first hit, a song that collides a thousand truths in three minutes.

3. Elvis Costello & The Attractions - Oliver’s Army

Costello’s passionate love affair with song writing continues to echo on, but he is best remembered for this landmark tune. ‘Oliver’s Army’ was written after Costello visited Belfast in the late 1970’s. It criticizes the British Army for targeting disadvantaged young men, who upon leaving secondary school were confronted with a stark choice between boot camp or dole queue. It is typical of Costello to bridge a multitude of associations. The song’s title refers to Oliver Cromwell’s puritan New Model Army, whilst the lyrics refer to trouble spots across the world, such as apartheid-era South Africa. Pulling no punches, the song includes the lyric “Only takes one itchy trigger/ One more widow, one less white nigger.” It is an anthem, a lesson about socio-economic realities, and a cracking pop classic. What a great way to subvert the nation - stinging political satire served up on Top of the Pops.

2. The Jam - That’s Entertainment

Other than for the money, why does The Enemy bother? Anything they do, Weller & co. have done already - and better. Whether bemoaning the ‘Town Called Malice’ or castigating the snobs of ‘The Eton Rifles’ who heckled unemployed demonstrators, The Jam were grit, were Brit, were real and original. If you are going to copy them, you might as well be a tribute band. If you’re going to claim to be a fan, like Tory leader David Cameron, you should be moved by the words as well as the tune. In ‘The Eton Rifles’, Paul Weller wrote about class division, a point seemingly lost on Cameron, the ex-Etonian. To be fair to PM-in-waiting, Jam bassist Bruce Foxton sent his own son to be educated at Eton, so class division is not what it used to be. Amongst the jewels Weller’s songwriting talent, the finest is ‘That’s Entertainment’. Harrowing and beautiful, you cannot help be moved by its message of the grim acceptance of a life of urban decay and destitution.

1. Pulp - Common People

Can a song get any more British than this? Forget the jingoistic fervour that surrounds Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance Marches. Forget God Save the Queen. This is the song that should be used to close out the Last Night of the Proms. Jarvis Cocker’s composition has everything that is good about British music. It is poppy, and lyrical. It is witty, and intelligent. It is bright, and caustic. It is personal, political, introspective and fun. You can dance to it, or ponder its meaning. It tells the story of a boy meeting a girl, and the story of a meeting between privilege and poverty. Ultimately, it does more than just defend the common people from the class tourist it depicts. This song ennobles the ‘Common People’. It tells how they “…dance and drink and screw/ Because there’s nothing else to do” to a eurodisco beat that might encourage anyone to dance, drink or screw. Like the characters he sings of, Jarvis’ song is a triumph that transforms the mundane into the magnificent. Instead of being downtrodden, the common people are the heroes of this song, with their appetite for life never quenched.

Noel Coward once remarked that it was “extraordinary how potent cheap music is”. Pulp’s classic celebrates the potency of the common people of Britain, and that is why it is my number one. Feel free to get up and bop around the room when you play this video. I know I will.