Following completion of the World Copyright Summit, ZeroPaid made a brief inventory of some of the interesting points of discussion. Strikingly, the presidents of several European societies see an important role in the so-called 'download tax' by ISPs. The idea behind this is that ISPs benefit from traffic from illegal downloads, and should therefore pay a fee for the copyrighted works that are illegally distributed via their networks. ISPs would probably pass on these cost to the subscriber in the internet subscription fees.

Read here about the Belgian SABAM and the German GEMA proposals.

Regardless of whether this is the best solution, it immediately raises a new problem which I believe is not as easy to solve, namely how these ISP's would then distribute the collected fees to the international artists. To determine which artists are illegally downloaded and thus how the collected money should be distributed properly, the internet would have to be monitored and looked into on a deeper level. And that is at odds with the right to protection of privacy.