Last week at SXSW, music industry veteran Jim Griffin broached the idea that file sharers pay a small fee through their ISPs in exchange for unlimited file sharing. There is a great deal to recommend an idea like this (as we've been saying since 2004), but there's a right way and a wrong way to go about it.
We are big fans of a collective licensing solution for the music file-sharing dilemma: music fans pay a few dollars each month in exchange for a blanket license to share and download whatever they like; collecting societies collect the money and divvy it up between their member artists and rightsholders. It's not a radical idea -- that's roughly how we pay songwriters for radio play, concert hall performances, and the music playing in your favorite restaurant.
But this should not turn into, as some have called it, an "ISP tax." Any collective licensing solution should be voluntary for fans, artists, and ISPs alike. We don't have a compulsory "restaurant tax" for songwriters -- there's no reason to have a compulsory "Internet tax" for file sharing. It should give fans what they want, rather than trying to withhold things from them -- after all, artificial scarcity is what got us into this mess. And it must give artists the freedom to choose among competing collecting societies, which is the only mechanism that will guarantee the kind of transparency and efficiency that much of the current music industry lacks.
Read on for a quick reference guide to help distinguish a good collective licensing plan from a bad "ISP tax."
