P2P technology is rapidly creating a decentralized communication infrastructure where everything digital is available for everybody for the flat price of bandwidth. As this is pretty much an ideal storage and distribution system - all costs voluntarily covered by users, no slow or expensive bureaucracy, no centralized authorities in a position to censor or block communications - it will naturally be globally adopted and eventually also legalized under public pressure. A condition where all public content - science, art, entertainment, news - is freely available in an open world library does not mean the end of music, movie, news or publishing businesses. The condition just makes public digital content abundant and cheap, so the content businesses need to sell something more substantial, unique, fresh, interesting or valuable to make their money.
Maybe there is no need for extra compensations for the disappearing distribution profits at all. The transition process to the full-availibility condition will still take years so the content businesses and creative professionals will have time to adapt their dealings and budgets to the new situation. Should it become obvious at some stage that some sort of compensation is needed to prevent mass starvation of artists or an apocalyptic cessation of artistic creativity, I would personally accept a small flat tax on bandwidth, presuming the collected taxes are fairly redistributed to the content creators and producers. The fairest, most democratic way of distributing such a tax is that every taxpayer determines herself who will get her tax money (a task that your media player can make easy or automatical for you).
- tg
