* Swedish Net War diary *

[TankGirl]

10.6.2006

Researcher: broadband tax possible, 1 USD/month maximum

"It is technically possible to compensate the musicians whose works have been copied without authorization by using an extra license fee on broadband connections", says researcher Anders Edström Frejman from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm to Dagen's Nyheter.

"The record labels are no doubt thankful if they can get money from broadband operators, and some sort of measurement and compensation model could surely be agreed on. But I don't think the labels will show green light to filesharing of copyrighted material even then. And that leads to a logical sommersault of them saying that unauthorized copying is forbidden and at the same time demanding broadband users to pay compensations for copyrights.

Frejman himself has in his research managed to develop a counting system to monitor which songs are most often downloaded from a DirectConnect p2p network. He believes it is technically possible to develop similar systems for the five or six biggest p2p networks that exist today. "Similar systems are already used by the American companies who monitor the popularity of songs on p2p networks and then sell this information to the record companies. It won't be 100 % accurate like the system we have for airplay counting but it would still be usable." As the p2p networks are international, the measurement system should take into account only Swedish downloaders but they can be filtered by their IP numbers.

Frejman says that the tax should not be higher than 10 Swedish Crowns (approximately 1 USD) per month. His view is that the big record labels have so far grossly exaggerated their losses. According to a fresh "Music Lessons" study done in the Royal Institute of Technology 55% of filesharers buy roughly the same amount of music as they did before filesharing; 7 % buys slightly more; 3 % much more; 25 % a little less and 10 % much less. Many were also found to visit concerts more actively than they did before filesharing.