Barenaked Ladies frontman Steve Page gave an eloquent interview to Ars Technica about "compulsory licenses" — a license fee that you and I could pay to get the right to download all the music we want. The idea is to compel the music industry to sell its wares over P2P, the way that the music-listening public wants it (70 million filesharers in the US alone!). Blanket licenses already enable jukeboxes, records, radio, and live performance — it's just poor individual music-lovers who don't get a blanket license deal from the industry.
"Not everyone's an artist," Page says, "but people can now express themselves like artists do, by sharing something that means something to them. If we had a system of compulsory licenses, they don't have to worry about going and getting a license to do it, or circumventing the system."
(via Copyfight)
