The intentionally oxymoronic Electronic Frontier Foundation has issued a 20-page report on illegal file-swapping and peer-to-peer sharing, and the results are exactly as you’d expect. Four years after the RIAA filed its first lawsuits against often unsuspecting individuals, the EFF concludes that you really don’t make friends with salad: “Suing music fans is no answer to the P2P dilemma.”
So if filing 20,000 lawsuits against college kids, grandparents and other societal menaces with no sign of abatement is not the answer, then what is? The EFF advocates a “voluntary collective licensing regime” whereby users pay a monthly fee that allows them to legitimately download and keep any music in the collective.
That’s not a bad plan. Some lawsuits would still be necessary to prevent widespread illegality under the new system, but the targets will likely change. We’re not exactly sure how that would shut down illegal file-sharing once and for all, but it would at least provide a more reasonable outlet for legal downloading.
Here’s our modest proposal: Product Placement, Advertising and Licensing. All music, in all forms, from this point forward will be free or low-cost to the consumer, and the artist will be responsible for financing the albums and growing rich through advertising income, selling the songs to movies and telly, and touring the country. Sure we’ll have to put up with more songs about the Whopper, hip sneakers and cellular telephones, but hey, think how free of guilt you’ll be when Wilco’s new album, Crying With My Sears Craftsman Portable Power Tools, hits the iPod.
- EFF PDF: RIAA v. The People: Four Years Later
- Great Arts Technica blog post on the subject: EFF report slams RIAA lawsuit campaign, calls for flat-fee, unlimited P2P
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