Legalise file-sharing with taxes?

Andrew Orlowski, technology journalist and author, said, in a keynote speech at the Interactive In The City conference being held in Manchester, Pop piracy should be decriminalised and the music industry should realise that efforts to stop illegal downloading are doomed, and istead they should embrace file-sharers. Ok, so this is something most of us have been saying for a while. Stopping illegal illegal file-sharing, is going to be hard. Mr. Orlowski made a suggestion that maybe record companies should find other ways to generate the cash for artists. A radical idea proposed was the introduction of a smal surcharge to net subsciption fees, which would then be distributed amongst those whose music is being shared.

Although he said that the current form of peer-to-peer networks let the music industry track down the most prolific file swappers, the next generation of technologies will render such efforts futile. These next generation networks and technologies could make it easier to swap, and harder to stop.

News source: BBC News