[TheReg] Legal, British P2P 'by end of year' - Overclock.net

Evostance · 06-28-08

Quote:

Exclusive Legal broadband subscription services that permit file sharing may appear on the market by the year's end, according to music industry sources - after government intervention brought both music suppliers and ISPs to the table.

The UK would become the second country after South Korea where the music business has agreed to offer licenses to file sharing services in a bid to reverse declining revenues. The co-operation follows the intervention of "Brown's Fist", the former advisor and Parliamentary Under-Secretary at BERR (the Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform) Baroness Shriti Vadera. Vadera is understood to have threatened both the ISP and music businesses with reform and policy intervention, threats which encouraged both parties to open negotiations.

The government is understood to be extremely reluctant to intervene with legislation as it threatened to do earlier this year, and cross-industry agreement to offer attractive consumer broadband music services would mean it wouldn't have to.

No deals have been signed yet and significant details have yet to be addressed. These include the royalty share between mechanical, sound recording and publishing rights holders, and administration issues. A significant amount of music released has never been licensed digitally - so should a music service provider ignore it, or attempt to pay the owners? As for price, this will be determined by the ISPs. However, sources are confident that Q4 2008 or Q1 2009 will see such the first of these offered to the public.

The move would represent the most radical supply-side reform ever considered by the music business in the modern era.

The major difference between the next generation of broadband-backed subscription schemes that are now under discussion, and those in operation today, is that future services would permit and encourage exchanges of music between subscribers. Most of today's subscription services such as eMusic and Napster permit the subscriber to download songs but not share them. There are exceptions: Omnifone's licensed mobile service Music Station permits "sharing" - Music Station subscribers can share playlists and the receiving device is populated with songs centrally over the network. QTrax offers a legal P2P service but this is ad-supported, rather than subscription-based.

The services require copyright holders to suspend, albeit privately and voluntarily, the exclusive right to copy a sound recording, in exchange for a license (and no doubt financial guarantees).
What's in it for me?

As envisaged, the new music services track exchanges of songs within a network using non-intrusive technology, and reward rights holders by their popularity. The new services provides advantages for subscribers, networks and rights holders.

For music lovers, activity that previously fell under copyright infringement becomes legal - lifting the threat of prosecution or disconnection. A more positive attraction is that there is no incentive to go to sites that distribute malware, or support phishing or child pornography in order to obtain music. Nor is there a need to obfuscate song names in Pig Latin, for example. More significantly, the supply side effects for consumers should lead to superior discovery tools for music: neither the consumer nor the music company has an interest in material being hard to find.

For the ISPs, music services offer a powerful customer attraction and retention tool, and ultimately relieve the pressure of dealing with high-bandwidth infringing users. (Contrary to their public statements, ISPs are keen to boot these infringing downloaders off their networks). If ISPs can convert a significant number of subscribers to use above-ground services, the appeal of hard-to-manage, badly-behaved protocols such as Bittorrent diminishes, making networks easier and cheaper to operate.

More:http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06...rovider_talks/

003 · 06-28-08

Cool. It will never happen in the US though, because then the RIAA wouldn't have any more dead grandmothers to sue!

cognoscenti · 06-28-08

Brown fist hey

switch.dota · 06-28-08

ROFL@that.

Licht · 06-28-08

Quote:

Originally Posted by 003

Cool. It will never happen in the US though, because then the RIAA wouldn't have any more dead grandmothers to sue!

They definitely wouldn't be happy but the government doesn't necessarily have to listen to them.

Shin2k35 · 06-28-08

Wow, fantastic. This basically means that all P2P services would be legalised as far as music sharing is concerned. Massive step up in the world. I'll be subscribing.

boydyboyd · 06-28-08

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shin2k35

Wow, fantastic. This basically means that all P2P services would be legalised as far as music sharing is concerned. Massive step up in the world. I'll be subscribing.

I'll be subscribing too (if it happens). Hell, i'll even move ISP if i have to!

This might encourage BT to upgrade to 21cn a little faster, as there will be a massive demand for bandwith if filesharing goes legal.

I may need another hard disk. 5tb should be enough

Brenbren · 06-28-08

awesome! no need to worry about letting some linux distros seeding a little.

kennymester · 06-28-08

I would sign up for this in a heartbeat if it happened in the U.S. I don't why someone doesn't bring this up in the gov. Probably because they're too old and out of the loop. If this would mean I would have to pay 20 bucks more a month for internet I wouldn't mind one bit.

Lemondrips · 06-28-08

Quote:

Originally Posted by kennymester

I would sign up for this in a heartbeat if it happened in the U.S. I don't why someone doesn't bring this up in the gov. Probably because they're too old and out of the loop. If this would mean I would have to pay 20 bucks more a month for internet I wouldn't mind one bit.

Agree'd cause then you would get your moneys worth imo.

06-28-08	#3 (permalink)
cognoscenti 51° 31' 0 N 0° -6' 0 E Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Winebar Posts: 4,144 Rep: 414 Unique Rep: 187 Trader Rating: 3	Brown fist hey __________________ The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.--Augustine (354-430) Q6600 @ 4017.37 MHz on Striker II Q6600 3802.47 MHz (422.5 * 9) 790i Ultra Q6600 4152.04 MHz (461.34 * 9) 8-8-8-18 790i Ultra

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[TheReg] Legal, British P2P 'by end of year'

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