Illegal downloading – a solution. Maybe…

i had an idea triggered by something i saw obliquely in today’s newspapers.

it is clear (at least to me) that technological and litigation based solutions to peer-to-peer and other means of file sharing are not going to work.  and i really don’t believe in making the ISP’s police all traffic.  We could just use encryption to avoid that anyway.

In Germany, users pay a premium for photocopiers that goes to publishers.  the idea being that it ‘pre-pays’ a percentage of lost revenue from illegal copying.  Sort of pre-emptive absolution.

In the UK we have paid an extra amount for blank cassettes which goes to publishers and labels, for the same purpose.

We also have examples of an all you can eat approach to licensing in Napster, Omnifone and others.

So my idea is that all ports other than certain well known, low-number, classic IP services are blocked by ISPs.  and this is done via legislation so that there is no complaint room from users and everyone is in the same boat.  no upnp no nothing.  

to get ports generically unblocked, a user must pay a fee of, say, £50-60 per year.  all ports are unblocked for this sum. The ISPs collect the fee and remit directly to the collecting societies, studios and labels in whatever proportion the government require.  

Napster et al require continuing payment for continuing usage rights.  They price at about £60 per year.  I’m suggesting discounting this both in expanded usage rights (forever once downloaded) and in price: £50 or so.  The volume alone should make up quite a bit.  and it’s not _that_ much over the average yearly cost of an ISP subscription these days.

the key elements of ease of administration and ‘fairness’ seem to be there.  it’s a broad brush approach, but so are other solutions too.  i’d lose the ability to use foldershare (for example) and other legal file sharing services, if I didn’t want to pay.  But i wouldn’t mind paying if this represented a genuine solution that stopped the stupid moaning of the MPAA and equivalents.

This is my first post about legal issues – despite being a specialist in this area. I’m thinking of taking this blog further into the legal field, depending on interest.