Fascinating paper by copyright scholar Neal Netanel on compulsory licenses and P2P. The idea is that P2P nets are themselves valuable, but imperiled by copyright law, whose purpose is to make work available to the public, but which often fails in this regard. In order to compensate artists and promote use of file-sharing, Netanel proposes that ISPs pay a small fee per connection that is passed on to an ASCAP-like collecting society. The collecting society uses part of the money to search the web, to seek out Nielsen-family-like volunteers and to monitor sharing networks, and uses the data gleaned to disperse the rest to artists. Under this scheme, artists get paid, P2P nets flourish, ISPs have a much more valuable commodity to sell, and there's a strong impetus to develop ever-better file-sharing nets.
It sounds like a kinda far-out idea, but it's not all that different from the compulsory license that saved radio over 50 years ago, when broadcasters were expected to seek out licenses for each and every song they played, something too expensive to realistically undertake. The advent of compulsories — which were not without their own problems, to be sure — saved radio by requiring that broadcasters pay into a kitty which would be paid out to the artists whose music was discovered through statistically valid random sampling of the airwaves.
Link (788k PDF)
