Wired’s Listening Post reports that Warner Music has a plan to charge people a flat fee on the ISP level for the right to download unlimited amounts of music on p2p networks without the threat of litigation.
wat.
I’m still in shock. Hath mine own eyes deceived me? Is this really happening? Someone should check on Bob Lefsetz – he might be in cardiac arrest right now.
Coming back down to earth, it looks like the plan is not very well thought out yet and there are a lot of questions still to be answered.
What is known is that Jim Griffin has been hired by Warner to create “an ASCAP for the internet, collecting fees from ISPs and divvying them up among rights holders.” In the same way that diners pay restaurant’s music licensing fees with each dish they order, ISP customers would pay a bit more per month for the right to download as much music as their hard drives can eat.
The very notion that someone at Warners gets it is pretty shocking to me. Yes, this is a solution that should have been put in place a decade ago, but as I’ve said before, this sort of rational thinking from a major label was unfathomable to us in the industry even just a scant year ago. There’s still the problem of getting the rest of the labels on board, but I’m pretty confident that once one of them has a good plan of execution in place, the rest should fall like dominoes.
Bravo Warners, bravo.
Read more [blog.wired.com]