“Why” you might ask, “is a greeny EU politics blog telling me to look for a piece of music I’ve never heard of, by a Colombian pop star?” Well, it is precisely that the song is not available in Britain, while it is available here in Belgium (and indeed around most of the rest of the continent). Does it not seem just a bit wrong that I can only buy this song with my Belgian bank account and address? If I try in the UK, no luck; the Dizzee Rascal infused hispanophone pop will have to wait.

Call me an idealist with a questionable taste in music, but I thought half the point of the diplomatic motorcades, Council of Ministers hoo-haas, European Commission, and all that which blights and brightens life here in Brussels, was to “establish an internal market”. If the music industry is still segmented so distinctly between countries, then surely, this cannot be called an internal market?

Now, my first instinct (once I had laboriously procured the Loca Freemasons Radio Edit), was to think that this sort of prohibition must be contrary to the treaties of the EU! How can the maintenance of strict, nationally demarcated markets for a whole industry possibly be allowed under EU law? Sadly, since it doesn’t seem that any governmental involvement to perpetuate the divisions exists, it looks like it is quite possibly legal.

But—and if it wasn’t already clear enough, from the fact that I have spent my evening with a copy of the treaties and European Court of Justice cases, that I’m a bit of a politics/legal geek, it will soon become apparent—I couldn’t leave it there.

Now, it does say in a Regulation that breaches of the rules on the internal market can be caused by people as well as governments, so there’s scope perhaps for the licensing bodies which enforce the national music market divisions to be breaking the rules. But this does all rather rely on a definition of what music is.

Not that I’m asking whether you could place a legal definition on whether the disturbingly bouffanted warblings of JedWard can be defined as constituting music; rather I mean, when I click ‘Buy’ in iTunes, what precisely am I buying? Is it a product (under one set of EU rules), or merely an intellectual property right to use and copy the music in a restricted set of circumstances (under another set of rules)?

In its terms and conditions, iTunes calls itself a service, and talks of me buying “a licence for digital content (“Products”)”. Amazon MP3 also mentions my “right to use the Digital Content”, once I’ve handed over some cash. So it sounds like, as far as the online stores are concerned, I’m buying a licence to intellectual property, which doesn’t count as buying a “good” under European law.

Thanks to this contractual nicety, the inclusion of private actions in the list of things which can cause obstacles to the internal market might not be justified in this matter (I’m certainly not  lawyer, just good at quoting case references), but assuming it is justified, would a concerted effort to segment the market for music downloads count as a violation of EU law? Well, assuming that my trashy Colombian pop download is a ‘service’, then quite possibly, yes; though the distinctions which need to be made here are far beyond me.

Of course, I’m in no position to engage a lawyer and bring a case to the ECJ, if it could even get that far (my non-lawyerlyness can’t be stressed enough), but to have a single market for media across the EU would be of massive benefit to European Citizens. Imagine not having to download pirated copies of songs by The Dø that you hear and love when listening to Studio Brussel over the Internet in the UK. Imagine being able to legitimately watch the latest episode of Come Fly With Me or Spooks when you’re sitting in a student flat in Holland.

Ok, so most Europeans don’t have quite the same cross-border tastes as me, but the prohibition on enjoying the music I want to listen to, and the films and TV programmes I want to watch has got to be as much against the principles of a single united Europe as you can get.

One solution to all this mess of barriers would be to simply ignore the idea of buying a licence for the music I listen to; plenty of people already do so, and thus free themselves of the boxing-in that media industries inflict on their customers. The thing is, I want to pay for the music I listen to. Maybe Madonna doesn’t need the few cents I send her way when buying a song, but the cost of developing, recording, and distributing music has to be covered somehow. Anyway, despite the fact I don’t sell any of it, I do produce content (this blog, my photos on Flickr, etc.), for which I appreciate my right to determine how other people can use it (most of it, but not all, is licensed under Creative Commons).

There is some hope, in that the EU has recognised the problems presented by a fragmented market in online music, but whether anything will be done… I don’t think it too likely. Maybe, whenever it eventually becomes an option, this would make a good subject of a Citizens Initiative.

If there are any legally minded people who’d care to enlighten me on the many points where I’m sure my attempts at legal thinking have gone disastrously wrong, then feel very free to use the comments section.

Finnish lake image from daneen_vol on Flickr. The Shakira statue image is in the public domain. Fishing rod image from tsmall on Flickr. Graphic  is licensed under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-SA 2.0) which applies only to this image. The copyright to this article is reserved, and it should not be considered to be licensed as the rest of this site.

I’m sorry, but at what point did private persons gain the right to block the press from reporting the proceedings of our Parliament?!

One of the jobs of the press is to be the conduit between the people, politics, and society; it should be free to report the public activities of our elected representatives, and it should be free to hold them, and powerful persons and organisations to account for their actions. What the lawyers for Trafigura have done here is break that function.

So, let’s help out the good old Guardian by saying, loudly, what they cannot say. Head over to Twitter and retweet the parliamentary question, spread links to the story, and write about it on your own blogs.

I haven’t yet today infected my mind with the endless speculation and incessant ‘man on the street’ views that will no doubt be playing all day on the BBC News Channel, but I imagine a fair number of people will be of the opinion that public figures are fair game, with little right to keep parts of their lives private; it’s certainly a view I’ve heard before, and it seems like it’s the view held by the News of the World journalists and executives involved in this disgrace. I may post on this again later, when I’m able to write more that my own idle speculation.

When I did hear about it, I was initially slightly panicked at the idea of a pandemic of a virus which was, according to the Guardian, most lethal to young and healthy people. Over time though, I came to realise that a more peaceful and pleasant life could be achieved by switching off the BBC News Channel and logging off the BBC News Web-site, and limiting my news intake to the World Service (that last bastion of mostly serious news) and the Guardian Weekly.

It annoys me a lot that the press now feels it necessary to sensationalise ‘boring’ (read ‘worthwhile’) stories, taking their coverage beyond all sense of proportion, and stuff the rest of their coverage with trash stories such as whatever it was with Susan Boyle that was so interesting, and the fact that in winter it snowed. The result is a society which is dreadfully informed about what is really happening in the world, satiated on a fast-food diet of celebrity and reality-television trash, where anything serious has to either be ‘deep-fried’ in reality-television oil, as can be seen with the Jury Team’s hideous and thought-free X-Factor style list for the European elections, or sensationalised, as swine ‘flu, and the economic difficulties have been.

Is there an alternative though? Perhaps if it were possible to force all news outlets to behave like the Guardian Weekly, the World Service and the rather good nightly BBC World News, then the public would be excellently informed on the state of the world, engaged with politics and capable of reaching reasonable conclusions on important matters of the day. Unfortunately, though I’d love to see more of the sort of journalism that is found in these publications and broadcasts, it is a sad fact that that would simply turn a lot of people off the news completely. While it is debatable as to whether no news is better than poorly reported news, I can’t see how alienating millions from the news would be beneficial, whatever benefit they are currently able to draw from it. I can’t see how, so long as inequality in education, social status, and income are as sharp as they are now, we can have a mass media which is free from what is essentially prolefeed.

I’ll try to stop this from becoming even more of a premature ‘grumpy old man rant’, and finish by including a knock-off of the well known Keep Calm and Carry On poster. I think it’s quite fitting advice for whatever the next crisis thrown up might be.

Network Europe

Okay, so most of my choices are from MSM of some form. Network Europe is good at the non political stuff. It covers cultural and lighter stories, though there is a painfully loud tone at the very start of the programme, which makes iPod listening less than perfect.

The Record: Europe

This seems to be the only programme on EU affairs on British television, so it has a guaranteed slot in my viewing habits. Most definitely for proper politics geeks, and unfortunately only available for UK viewers unless you have BBC World News.

Café Babel

A strange quasi-blog/magazine/social network for young Europeans. The RSS feed hasn’t worked for ages, but it’s worth a browse anyway. Has some of the odder European stories.

EurActiv

Without this I’d know nothing of what happens in Brussels. The news section is on my list of must read RSS feeds every day, and the LinksDossiers have become my first port of call for research.

Of course there are lots more that I’d list here if I could be bothered (but I can’t, and I have a kettle to replace), so I’ve updated my blogroll with some of them.

Both sides apparently employed media relations companies in Brussel to fight their cause with the press. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Twenty-four hour news output on all platforms imaginable makes having some form of control on what goes out there important, and professional PR firms certainly aren’t foreign in other areas where you might not expect them to operate.