Peter Jenner: filesharing can’t be stopped, perhaps blanket licenses by ISPs?

Peter Jenner, former manager of Pink Floyd and Secretary General (!) of the International Music Managers Forum (IMMF) is known as an impassioned advocate for artist rights and the importance of protecting musicians' revenue streams. In the past, Jenner has been very critical of illegal file sharing. Although he is no fan of big music labels, he is also a fierce opponent of so-called 'free riders' (as in this radio interviewy, including some pretty British versions of the f-word).

Nowadays Jenner seems to be coming to terms with the fact that file sharing should not be feared, but should rather be embraced, according to an interview with MusicAlly.

According to Jenner, now that in the online world, the marginal cost of a digital file is essentially zero, it an "inescapable reality" that the digital world is pushing the price of music towards zero. This development makes copyright law and its enforcement – actually more of a record label than an artist thing - like ‘barking down a blind alley’. Attempts to get people to stop copying music are not just a waste of time, but also make the law offensive. Jenner illustrates this with a nice reference to the unsuccessful attempts to prohibit alcohol during the Prohibition in America’s thirties.

The solution according to Jenner is to rebuild the relationship between creators and the public. The latter have an "inexhaustible demand for new content", and creators want to go on writing songs, books and making games. Jenner finds it essential that the public can buy content and use new technologies without having to worry about it (being illegal).

For Jenner this translates into the idea of a blank license, perhaps sold within ISPs subscriptions. He believes that the creative industries should work together with internet providers to see how a future source of income can be generated that can guarantee creators an income based on users appreciation of their creations.

Naturally, the next big question is how collecting licensing obtained through ISPs fees should be distributed. This immediately raises a number of issues.

• How much should such a license cost? According to Jenner 1 dollar per month should be enough to globally yield 60 million dollar per month to ensure music artists’ income. But besides music many more types of content are freely exchanged over the Internet, such as movies, games and television series. How much should an ISP then ask for a full license covering all types of content, in addition to the cost of the internet subscription? Something around 5, 10 or 20 dollars a month? Is it realistic to expect that file sharers accept such an increase of internet subscription costs, instead of illegally downloading for free?
• How to choose the best allocation of the total revenues? How to determine the extent to which different artists are valued and then translate that into a certain amount or proportion of the total revenue?
• Also, who will oversee the large amounts of money that organisations collectioning these licence fees muster? In the Netherlands copyright organization Buma/Stemra suffered heavy criticism after losing 46 million euro’s on a investment portfolio of 330 million euro’s in 2006.
• Finally, the collection, supervising, calculation and distribution of these license fees need to be done, perhaps by new organizations. How much of the total licensing fees may be taken off for the administration of these tasks? In the Netherlands Buma/Stemra again suffered a lot of criticism for cutting off far too much on account of its own costs and the lack of openness about directors’ salaries. There were actually also problems to get the total amount of  collected money distributed.

Collecting blanket licenses in cooperation with internet providers, instead of fierce copyright enforcement, like Jenner and many others propose, is certainly a business model to consider in the digital era and reality of file sharing. But first, much more debate seems needed to work out this particular business model.

Source: TechDirt