Kazaa, Verizon Propose Compulsory Music Licensing

Kazaa, Verizon propose to pay artists directly

By Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY

Jim Guerinot, a board member of Don Henley's and Sheryl Crow's Recording Artists Coalition and the manager of No Doubt, Beck and The Offspring, is such a fan of digital music that he has ripped his CD collection into MP3s and listens to them on his portable Apple iPod on his daily bicycle commute to work.

But you won't find any of his artists' work posted on Pressplay, the Net subscription service backed by their record labels. He removed them, he says, because the acts weren't getting paid.

The record industry has responded to the immense popularity of file-sharing — and trading of copyrighted material — by suing to close the operations down. But as one swap site shuts, others take its place, and more people are downloading now than ever.

An unlikely alliance of swap-service Kazaa and telephone and Internet giant Verizon is floating a proposal to break the logjam of lawsuits: Computer manufacturers, blank CD makers, ISPs and software firms such as Kazaa will pool funds and pay artists directly.

"Historically, there's been a clash between the content community and new technology, back to the player piano," says Verizon vice president Sarah Deutsch. "We're proposing the idea of a copyright compulsory license for the Internet, so peer-to-peer distribution would be legitimate and the copyright community would get compensation. It's hard to get the genie back in the bottle."

Kazaa lobbyist Phil Corwin says a $1-a-month fee per user on Internet providers alone (it's unclear whether costs would be passed along to subscribers) would generate $2 billion yearly: "We're talking about a modest fee on all the parties who benefit from the availability of this content."

Recording Industry Association of America president Hilary Rosen calls the proposal "the most disingenuous thing I've ever heard. It's ridiculous."

But Guerinot isn't ready to dismiss it out of hand: "Any model that starts to accommodate monetizing the artists is worth looking into."

Guerinot is upset that the labels have tried to combat technology with alternatives that have been widely rejected by the public. MusicNet and Pressplay offer limited downloads, but not in the preferred MP3 format, and they usually can't be transferred to portables or burned to CDs.

"It would be like me opening a video store, charging 10 times what others were charging and only offering videos in the Beta format," Guerinot says. "In any business, when you have billions of downloads occurring, you don't say we're going to ignore that market and try to create something else. You serve your customers."

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Originally posted by Phantasm66
You can bet your bottom dollar that I'd pay £1 a month if I thought that no one would ever stand in my way again of downloading the mp3s I want, the movies and TV eps I want.... And if I thought that that £1 was going to the artists and production houses themselves.

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