Would cutting off the internet access of people who abuse copyright online really benefit legitimate entertainment retailers?

Lord Mandelson has declared war on internet file sharers in the Government’s latest attempt to get up to speed with what’s going on in the digital economy.

He plans to assume the powers currently sitting with communications regulator Ofcom, and require internet service providers to police the web by withdrawing internet access from those that they find abusing copyrights.

While the music industry itself has lobbied hard on this issue, would cutting off repeat offenders really be of benefit to the businesses that get music to market legitimately — entertainment retailers?

Research published in Norway earlier this year was quite clear that people who download music for free are music fans, and as such are also much more likely to buy music than those who don’t. In fact, the study of 2,000 consumers aged 15 or over showed they purchase 10 times more music than those who never do illegal downloads.

So peer-to-peer pirates are likely to be some of entertainment retailers’ best customers. I doubt they are the kind of people that the HMVs and Play.coms of the world want to be cut off from accessing their ecommerce sites.

This action is also a bit late – well, nearly a decade late actually. Where was the Government on this issue in 1999 when the original Napster was taking the internet by storm?

And in any case, has no one told Mandelson that file sharing isn’t even considered cool among the kids any more. They are all using legal services such as Last.fm and Spotify to listen to music for free. Try and keep up, Peter.

Back in the 1980s, I was one of those kids who religiously recorded the charts from Radio One each Sunday night, so I could listen to all my favourite songs on my Walkman. But I also grew up to own a massive CD collection; one which has only stopped expanding because I struggle to house it, forcing me to turn to iTunes.

Surely there has got to be a better way of turning the new generation of music lovers into music buyers than pulling the plug on the channel most of them use to make purchases.

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