Okay, this guy paints an accurate portrait of history in the first half of his article, but the second half is pure fantasy. (Sounds to me like one of those guys who started smoking pot when he turned 40.)
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Each digital file containing copyrighted content would contain a small "tag," indicating which specific work it is.
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The original creators of the work would be responsible for attaching those tags because the Joe Shmoe who rips his CDs isn't gonna do it for them. The tags would have to remain whenever the content is transfered from one medium to an other (CD to MP3, DVD to DivX) which means that it would have to be embeded as a watermark. Tracking watermarks can't be done the same way as tracking bandwidth. And there's nothing stopping users from removing tags and filtering watermarks.
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Once this metering technology is in place, require ISPs to pay royalties, on a statutory rate basis, to copyright holders for the aggregate usage of all copyrighted material that flows through their systems.
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The one redeeming trait of the Digital Milennium Copyright Act is that ISP's cannot be charged or sued for their users' activity on the internet.
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Why won't hackers undermine the metering technology, as they have undermined copy protection in the past? Because there will be no incentive to do so.
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Hackers are a strange sort. They hack when there is no incentive and they are idealists. They usually care about freedom more than money. But in this case there would be incentive because people would still have to pay for content, except this time they don't have the piece of mind that comes with buying a product from a trusted retailer with an actual name.
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ISPs must not be allowed to bill consumers on the basis of their individual usage of copyrighted material. Instead, they must pass on their licensing costs only in the form of a blanket surcharge on bandwidth.
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Smacks of communism to me. I don't want to pay for other people's use of the internet and I don't want them to pay for mine either. Besides, the flow of content on different ISP's will never be constant. As more content is distributed through ISP's their connection fees will fluctuate and they won't be able to control how competetive their prices are. It's unfair to both consumers and ISP's.
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Advertisers would lower the licensing surcharge further by paying ISP's for access to consumers' eyeballs.
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Some ISP's alredy do this and they are universally despised by consumers.
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Certainly government or private charities could subsidize access for schools and libraries.
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What do schools and libraries need this system for anyway? Libraries are protected and don't need permission to distribute copyrighted material. And school administrators don't want their students downloading music with their computers.
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How can such a system be deployed? Would it require a top-down, legislative solution, or can market pressures bring it about? How much of a surcharge will the public accept? Who will set the statutory rates, and how? Who will bear the cost for designing and implementing the metering system? How can we ensure ISP's report usage honestly? How to ensure privacy for individual consumers of content?
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The system would take months to deploy, that's a dozen lifetimes on the internet. The public won't accept any kind of surcharge. The industry lawyers will set the rates by calculating their losses from "piracy" and multiplying that number by 10. Consumers will bear the cost of the system in the end. There's no way for the ISP's to ensure that they can monitor every copyrighted item in their system, and there's plenty of reason to lie about their statistics. There's no need for costumer security with this system, if you can monitor their internet connections why not sell their information?
Pffft.