I’m always amazed by how easy it is to dislike Bono. The guy’s written some of my favourite songs, and he’s a tireless campaigner for human rights. I should be over-awed by this charming example of compassionate humanity, in the same way that I am by Joanna Lumley, but instead I often find myself wanting to use his fat stubbly head as a football; a football wearing smug plastic shades.

I’m sure that the hypocrisy of a millionaire rock star preaching to us about poverty doesn’t help here. So, when I first saw that Bono had to decided to have a pop at file sharers in his New York Times guest column, I thought that this would be another opportunity to imagine a penalty shoot-out with the aforementioned philanthropic football, but it turned out that I actually agreed with some of what he said.

For the sake of perspective, it should be pointed out that Bono’s comments on piracy occupied just three paragraphs of a three-page piece of editorial.

Secondly, Bono at no point suggested that U2 was in need of more money, which is stupidly what seems to have got some people worked up. His argument against mass Internet piracy was that it hurt ‘the young, fledgling songwriters who can’t live off ticket and T-shirt sales like the least sympathetic among us.’

He also acknowledged the irony of a rich rock star complaining about losing money to piracy, saying ‘Note to self: Don’t get over-rewarded rock stars on this bully pulpit, or famous actors; find the next Cole Porter, if he/she hasn’t already left to write jingles.’

Sadly, he then embarked on the facepalm train and suggested tracking people’s Internet usage as a way of identifying file sharers, and also attacked ISPs for apparently cynically profiting from mass piracy, despite the huge bandwidth costs that it presents. This is what’s got a lot of people worked up, including ISPs, and understandably so.

This is a shame, as there’s a very important point to be made about the widespread use of file sharing, and it’s one that rarely comes up in the verbal spats between music business reps and file sharers. On the one hand, representatives from the music industry frequently try to make their point by equating downloaded files with lost sales, despite the fact that many people wouldn’t buy the music if it cost money anyway.

There are all sorts of other ways in which the music industry has alienated many music lovers from its cause, which we’ll come to later, but that’s not to say that I haven’t heard some equally idiotic arguments from file sharers to justify music piracy.

These include a basic self-righteous sense of entitlement, as well as lumping in all record labels with Simon Cowell’s bland pop empire. I frequently hear people saying that new music simply isn’t worth paying for, yet they’re quite happy to spend their time listening to it if they can get it for free.

Okay, so not everyone would buy the music they download for free, but I’m certain that a lot more would if you could only buy it on physical media.

The most popular pro-piracy argument I hear at the moment is that file sharing enables people to listen to the music of new bands for free, and then the band can make its money from ticket sales for live gigs. Of course, this makes complete sense when you’re talking about a huge band such as U2. With their extravagant stage shows and massive fan base, U2 won’t have any trouble making money from live gigs, and you could argue that some free tracks on Bit-Torrent might even persuade more people to buy tickets.

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