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Five Dollars a Month for Legal P2P Could Happen Sooner than You Think
From ars technica, March 13, 2008
By Nate Anderson
With P2P file-swapping still proceeding almost unchecked and CD sales swirling down the toilet, music labels have shown an increased willingness to consider new business models over the last couple of years, even going so far as to drop their once-ubiquitous DRM. One intriguing idea that has been bandied about is levies: pay your ISP, say, five bucks a month,and you can legally listen to all the music you can find. Though such an arrangement raises plenty of questions (should the levy be compulsory, or can people opt out of it?), stakeholders across North America are at least open to the idea.
Two pieces out this week illustrate that fact quite nicely. Wired has a piece up today on Jim Griffin, a proponent of the $5 ISP model, who will appear on a panel tomorrow at SXSW in Austin to continue flogging his idea in public. P2P would suddenly become legal (for those who paid, anyway), with the cash doled out to labels and artists based on the number of times each artists’ work was traded each month. Such a system sounds wide open to gaming, of course, but if that problem could be solved, the music industry at least has a good chance at converting millions of file-swappers into paying customers.
Canadian law professor Michael Geist, who has covered such issues for years, notes that other levy plans are also gaining traction in Canada. We’ve already covered the proposal from the Songwriters Association of Canada that would also bring a $5 fee to Internet connections in return for the right to use P2P services to get music. Download services like iTunes could still charge whatever they like.
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