Robbie Williams thinks that music piracy is ‘great’, it seems. Speaking at a music industry event in Cannes the singer also said that ‘the heads of the record labels don't know what to do about it’.

He probably won’t be so smug if his record label fails to make enough money out of his records and cans his £80 million deal because everyone is buying counterfeit CDs or getting his latest tracks on the Internet.

But Robbie may have a point: the record companies really don’t have a clue about the net.

They’ve threatened people who share music online, set their highly-paid lawyers onto companies like Napster and KaZaA who provide the programs that let us share our CD collections, and even sold us CDs that won’t play on our computers in case we decide to make copies of them.

None of it seems to be working: KaZaA still has 21 million users, and new albums are often available to share on the Internet before they arrive in the shops.

Even my eleven year old daughter loads her CDs onto her computer to listen to them while she works, and she doesn’t like being stopped by the labels.

Blame the record companies

It’s hard to have any sympathy, when it’s all the record companies’ own fault. It has been obvious for years that you could send music over the Internet.

After all, the music on a CD is already a collection of bits, just like any other computer file. Copying it to a computer was never going to be a problem, and the network was getting faster every day.

Instead of realising this and figuring out ways to give fans what they wanted - a reliable and easy way to download new music at a reasonable cost - the companies stuck with the CD, because they were making so much money out of it.

They used every legal trick they could find to close down any online company that looked like it might succeed, refused to give permission for the music they owned to be distributed over the net, and generally messed up the party. No wonder nobody feels sorry for them.

Now, at last, they might be seeing sense. In the United States the music industry’s trade body, the Recording Industry Association of America, has started to work with the computing industry to try to find a sensible way forward.

New plan from US

The thing that worries both groups is a plan put forward in the US Congress to force manufacturers to put anti-copying devices in every device that can record - from PCs to DVD recorders.

This would make it really hard for them to try out new technologies in future so they don’t want it to happen.

It’s not all sorted yet: the movie industry doesn’t want to play ball and has refused to join the new plan, so we could still see our computers crippled in order to comply with a dodgy US law.

And the record companies aren’t planning to give their music away - we’ll all be expected to pay.

But if they can come up with a scheme which looks like good value, works reliably and gives me the latest bands then I might be interested.

Otherwise I’ll stick to the file sharing networks when I want to find something to listen to.

Is music easy enough to get online?
Click here to have your say!

One of the newest and shiniest mobile phones out there is the Orange SPV. It’s very different from other mobiles because it uses a cut-down version of Microsoft Windows, which should make it great for playing games, checking email and all sorts of other cool stuff.

The phone isn’t going down too well with users, though, because it has lots of bugs and keeps crashing. My friend Simon has had one for over a month and still hasn’t managed to send a photo message to anyone else!

As if that wasn’t bad enough, some enterprising users have figured out how to get around the phone’s security settings and run their own programs instead of just the approved ones that come with the phone.

Orange locking phones

Manufacturers Orange had blocked this, partly because they were worried about people writing phone viruses and partly because they want to make money by charging people who want to write games or other stuff to run on the phone.

Microsoft say they’ll have fixed the security hole in the next fortnight, and Orange don’t think anyone has had their phone damaged.

But as the technology we all carry around with us gets smarter and faster it can only be a matter of time before the first network virus brings the phone system crashing down.

Had security problems with your phone?
Click here to have your say!