Several proposals to collect money from Internet service subscribers to pay for online music swapping are bubbling to public attention in the United States and Canada.
A trade group representing Canadian songwriters and music publishers argued in front of that country’s Supreme Court on Wednesday that ISPs should pay into a nationwide pool–similar to a tax now imposed on blank tapes and CDs–to compensate copyright holders for widespread music downloading.
On Tuesday in Los Angeles, the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA), a peer-to-peer industry trade group, proposed a related idea that would ultimately give file-swapping networks a service model similar to cable television. Under the early stages of the DCIA proposal, ISPs would collect a fee from anybody using file-trading software and distribute that pool of money to record labels, artists and music publishers.
Under the plan, ISPs would have to install software such as that from Packeteer or other network-management companies that can identify which applications subscribers are using. Some portion of the fee would go to fund those activities, Lafferty said.
Later stages of the plan would evolve into a structure more like cable television. File swappers could subscribe to “channels” of encrypted content focused on a specific type of music for an extra fee. Ultimately, a top tier of service would be added in which subscribers could pay for individual, tightly copy-protected songs that would not be available at the free-trading lower service levels until a later date.
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