UC Berkeley Students Explore ISP Tax for Legal Campus File-Sharing

Masters thesis examines proposals to allow P2P in exchange for a monthly fee that ISPs would collect and make available to copyright holders based on individual artists’ download rates.

Matt Earp and Andrew McDiarmid, recent graduates of the UC Berkeley School of Information, have written an interesting masters thesis in which they construct a “working model of what a voluntary collective licensing scheme would look like in a ‘real world’ network, in this case at UC Berkeley.”

Called “An Investigation of Voluntary Collective Licensing for Music File-Sharing at UC Berkeley,” they developed a model for how licensed file-sharing might look on the campus network by considering the needs and practices of three groups of stakeholders: consumers of digital music (undergraduates); ISPs (network administrators); and digital music providers and music technology professionals. Investigating the needs of these stakeholders with respect to their theses was an “effort in triangulation.”

Their theses…
1. Licensed file-sharing is an attractive option for students, and many would opt to pay.

• 64% of students reported that they would be willing to pay into a blanket license for file-sharing.
• The 75% of respondents who have ever file-shared were 2.2 times more likely to be willing to pay than those who never have.
• 60% of all respondents indicated that a fair price per semester would be $10 or more, with most of these responses falling in the $10-$20 range.

Conclusion? 42% of all survey respondents indicated that they would pay $10 or more per semester for a license to file-share.

2. Voluntary collective licensing is technically achievable.

• 80% of students who file-share reported using a DC++ or other Direct Connect client with 30% reporting using only a Direct Connect client.
• 40% reported using a BitTorrent client to acquire music, 23% Limewire, and 18% reported using eMule or some other client.

Conclusion? Any fair accounting system must be able to monitor traffic on both the Internet and the intranet, and must be able to do so in a system-agnostic way.

3. Implementing such a system is in Berkeley’s best interest.

Current amount of time spent on copyright issues is, as one policy administrator put it, “really ridiculous,” elaborating, “the rub of all this is that we are taking on the work of the RIAA… A whole lot of work.”

With 70% of respondents to their survey reporting that UC Berkeley’s education campaign has had no effect on their file-sharing behavior, a licensing system could mean a “more effective use of resources, and policy administrators were interested in exploring the idea.”

“I like the idea of testing the technology. . . . [T]he only way to get a good feel for it is to test it,” commented one interviewee.

4. Navigating the rights at issue and negotiating licenses and payment with content providers present two major stumbling blocks to voluntary collective licensing’s adoption, and developing a test implementation at Berkeley is the best way to begin those negotiations

A former Napster executive said that there was a disagreement among the heads of the major record labels and the CEOs of their parent companies with regard to licensing their content for file-sharing. The CEOs of major media conglomerates like Sony for example, were interested in exploring the new possibilities for revenue that Napster represented while powerful record label executives steadfastly opposed the idea and prevented any deals..

The reason for this is that record label heads liked the outdated physical album model where a favorite song meant you had to purchase the whole thing and not just a single digital track.

“If you like this song, you [have to] buy the record, and if you buy the record, that’s eighteen dollars,” he said.

As a result of the major labels’ insistence on old business models, digital music providers are forced to “navigate a complex system of rights and royalties that is poorly adapted to their business” and prevents anyone from solving the file-sharing dilemma.

Therefore, if the record industry is serious about seeing colleges and universities properly combat file-sharing it must explore new methods for compensation, especially since every measure that the record industry has proposed up to now has been a miserable failure.

Conclusion?

“We believe that the same qualities that make universities and their students the primary targets of the RIAA’s campaign of ‘education and deterrence’ also make them ideally suited to test the merits of the system,” they write.

They ultimately note that the answer to the the first three of their theses is “yes,” that they are possible, but that ultimately the music industry’s reluctance to embrace it will continue to “pose a problem for effective implementation of the system, even if that system is shown to be desirable, achievable, and necessary given the changing distributing models that peer-to-peer file-sharing affords.”

Moreover, voluntary collective licensing (emphasis on voluntary) is perhaps the music industry’s best hope for stability in a world where file-sharing makes music consumption affordable and convenient. Until it takes strides to forget the past and realize that it has to compete on both these levels if it is ever to effectively combat illegal file-sharing then it will continue to play the proverbial fiddle while Rome burns.

The question is how long can it continue to do so?

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2. UC Berkeley Starts ‘Learn Before You Burn’ Campaign to Fight Campus Piracy
3. Reporters Engage in Heated Debate Over Campus File-Sharing Tax
4. File-Sharing Students Say The Ads Made Them Do It
5. US Congress Passes Anti-Campus File-sharing Requirements