Should ISPs Pay for Music?
A scheme that would shift the cost of digital music from users to Internet service providers is gaining international support.
"William “Terry” Fisher, a Harvard law professor and director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a key advocate of revising the process by which copyright holders get paid. His group is working on a project called the Digital Media Exchange, to be built next year. The Exchange would compensate artists by dividing customers’ subscription fees based on how many times a work is played.
Mr. Fisher said his preference would be for governments to impose a tax on ISPs to collect revenue and make all works available to consumers. He says that China, some countries in Eastern Europe, and Brazil seem as if they might be open to this possibility."
Read the Red Herring Article Here.
What a great report, dave.
The only way I could see this working is if music recognition software advanced to the point where it could identify music by the data streams being passed to each user – i.e., the ISP would scan each data packet sent to each IP address for music/MP3 data before passing it on, and thereby come up with an accurate tally of who-downloaded-what-how-many-times. Of course, I’m sure there are all kinds of thorny privacy issues here.