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Fair Compensation
The Future of Online Music
Laycock told p2pnet that none of the survey results came as a shock, "although my research into official music industry statistics produced some surprising results.
"In the UK we get headlines in the press about 'falling profits for the music industry' and 'an industry in crisis,' etc etc. But further analysis showed that more albums are being sold than ever before: it's just that prices are falling due to competition with other entertainment industries (eg, the movie industry, which is seeing a boom with DVD sales - exactly like the music industry did when it went digital with the CD in the eighties).
According to EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann, "voluntary collective licensing aligns the interests of the music industry with music fans ... the more people share music, the more artists and copyright holders should receive compensation for their creations."(Electronic Frontier Foundation, 2000).
The consumer's payment could exist as one (or a combination) of two methods of payment:
Micro-payments - each download invokes a small payment, e.g. iTunes 99 cents per track
Subscription - flat fee for a period of time, or an amount of downloads (by track or bandwidth)
The BPI estimates 7.4 million UK people download music illegally from file-sharing networks. If that number of people paid, say, £10 per month for the service, over three quarters of a billion pounds could be generated in one year. Shared between the music, film, software, animation, photography, visual art and ebook industries, this kind of compensation could offer a fair reward based on the popularity of their products.

posted by Jerry permanent link