While we tut at the disgraceful behaviour of Hoon, Hewitt and others caught up in the recent lobbying scandal, it was, being a rouse, fairly innocuous. However, as we do this an actual triumph for shady backroom politics is about to be bank rolled through Parliament by the big boys of the music industry.

I am speaking of The Digital Economy Bill, a bill so toxic to the real music industry, and so likely to hinder the development of new bands, that I am yet to hear one word in favour of it.

Nor am I likely to hear anything in it’s favour in Parliament as it is planned that the Bill will not be debated in the House. Instead Ministers have opted for it to be forced through in what is called the “wash up” – this is where the dregs of the last Government can be quickly rubber stamped because it would be just too inconvenient to debate. The theory goes that there would be too little time for a proper discussion……so lets just do away with the need for an examination process. Magic – all sorted.

“So the way it’s coming into force has a fishy smell, but what about the actual measures themselves?” I hear you cry. These are numerous and read like someone who would call Facebook “The Facebook” has written them, showing such a callous cynicism towards web 2.0 culture as they do. For fear of a rant I will restrict my comments to those concerning copyright online.

Here’s the technical bit. The Bill adds a clause to the Communications Act 2003 putting a duty of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to provide copyright owners with any details of infringements of their material and if these are “substantial”, the ISPs must then block access to that site. Further, the now notorious Clause 18 allows copyright owners to apply for a court injunctions against an infringing site.

So what’s wrong with that? Just don’t use copyrighted material!

Well technically yes. But look at the sites that could be hit – YouTube, Vimeo etc. In fact if you could find me one site on the internet that doesn’t have something that is of questionable copyright status I would be surprised. Even the BBC is likely to have some copyrighted material on it somewhere.

At TMM we see on a daily basis small PRs and bands putting out new material hoping for it on it going viral; for it to be picked up and shared. This has become their main way of promoting themselves and making it big. Sharing has become the new culture and it is something this site, and thousands of music blogs, will become literally guilty of.

What is likely to happen over time is that sites will shy away from publishing things amongst scare stories of sites being shut down and charges being laid for innocent behaviour. The upcoming and independent music scene will be strangled for the benefit of overly large, stagnant music companies.

However, the new culture has been good for these big players too. It was recently reported increase in digital sales more than outweighed the reduction in offline sales. This has been hugely helped by viral content. It was only last week that Lady Gaga’s Telephone, a copyrighted video, reached one billion hits through YouTube. This great publicity was achieved through sharing and embedding, the very illegal activity the record companies foresaw, and indeed clearly intended, for this video.

What the big companies are now asking for is the benefit of the power of the internet, whilst still being able, at their whim, to strike people down for using their material – and it seems they are going to get their way.