It’s a fair bet that most people who do download content illegally don’t download musical shows like Phantom Of The Opera. Still, Andrew Lloyd Webber left Lords in no doubt how much the problem needs fixing, when, in a meeting yesterday, he told them of “the cataclysmic consequences for all creative industries if this area remains unregulated”...

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Via Guardian.co.uk and Telegraph.co.uk: “The question that occurs to me is whether, in 10 years’ time, Britain would be a place that, say, The Beatles could have emerged from ... No. Not in a world where there are no longer shops where you can buy the physical products and the internet is a sort of Somalia of unregulated theft and piracy.”

Lloyd Webber cited an unnamed study claiming 7.3 million people in the UK use P2P illegally, rising to 8.7 million by 2012. ““They are not going to change without regulation ... Red wines in France are not content providers for the glass manufacturing business. Britain’s creative industries are not content providers for broadband.” He said ISPs should exert bandwidth throttling on law-breaking customers, an idea proposed by Lord Carter’s Digital Britain review.

(Photo: Tracey Nolan, some rights reserved)