Now's time for a better license system!
By Stephen Hinkle
As widely reported, hundreds of consumers were sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and their member labels for music sharing, and the RIAA claims that there are more lawsuits on the way. The RIAA targeted pre-teens, parents of teenagers, college professors, construction workers, among many other people for file sharing of music files, which has become an American accepted culture, and a popular function of the internet.
The RIAA claims that downloading an MP3 from an internet file sharing network such as KaZaa or Morpheus, is the same as stealing a CD.
However, according to a recent AOL poll more that 85% of the people polled disagree. It seems as if the RIAA is now out of touch with American culture. In fact, many who got sued, claim that they will not buy any more music because of what RIAA, and companies like BMG, EMI, Sony, Universal, Warner Bros, and others did to them. Many of them will have to pay a big debt, and are angry and mad as the result, too.
Now, with people believing that sharing and downloading MP3 and other music files should not be a crime, the question is, how can artists still make a living from the music business. The answer is: the music industry will have to adapt to the times, and find new revenue models.
One such revenue model would be a compulsory license, in which users could pay for the tracks they download. If 75% of the P2P users paid $5.00 per month in royalties, which many I have talked to think would be reasonable, it would generate hundreds of millions in income for the music industry at a near zero cost of distribution. If the user does not pay, they could be warned or sued. The advantages to this proposal would be that only users that download have to pay, people that just use the internet for the web and e-mail do not have to pay at all. The drawbacks to this model, are enforcement, and knowing what gets traded, in the case of decentralized networks, and firewalls.
Another revenue model the industry could explore is granting companies like Grokster, KaZaa, BearShare, and others licenses for a high catalog volume, and the services could pay artists through subscription fees, and ad revenue sharing. Grokster, Morpheus, Song Spy, Napster, and other P2P networks tried to get licenses in the past, and the labels would not even license to them. This model would allow P2P to be ad based and subscription based, and allow them to have a large catalog using their own distribution technology, and track what gets traded.
Still another model is to charge users based on their bandwidth usage of common P2P traffic. For example, the more traffic on ports 1214, 6346, 6347, 6996, and other common P2P ports, the higher the ISP fee is. The idea being, the more content you download and share, the more royalties you must pay. The advantages to this, is people get charged based on their usage. The drawbacks are that some P2P developers will simply use non-surcharged ports till the ISPs pass on the charges.
A non-commercial use levy tax, has been proposed by some people. In this scheme, people would pay for their music through taxes on computer hard disks, blank CD and DVD media, internet service, MP3 players, and other music devices. This would allow consumers to trade music for free online, and make up for the costs in the supplies that go along with it. The hard part to this scheme would be tracking what royalties go to whom.
Thoughts of deciding "Who Gets What?"
One way to accomplish this would be to use the "spy bots". Well, if they can find the IP addresses of infringes sharing certain songs, they can certainly use that info to distribute royalties, too! They could search for different names or phrases, and identify new occurrences of a certain song title, or artist.
Another one is surveys. Seeing what is popular by consumers, might be a good example. However, this approach might not reveal as many lesser known artists as the P2P spy search method. This could be done through web polls, and the like.
Copyright Registration based equality. This would give each artist the same share of the pie. It would not be based on popularity, but instead on pure fairness. Not everyone would consider it fair, but it would treat evolving artists and well known artists the same.
Conclusion:
These lawsuits will not stop all P2P. We need to license P2P sharing, and get artists and songwriters paid for it. The time to do it is now.
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