Hilary to ISPs: “Pay Up”

In what could be a major philosophical shift, RIAA chairman Hilary Rosen says the ISPs should have to pay for enabling file sharing:

“We will hold ISPs more accountable,” said Hilary Rosen … in her keynote speech at the Midem music conference on the French Riviera.

“Let’s face it. They know there’s a lot of demand for broadband simply because of the availability (of file-sharing),” Rosen said.

As broadband access in homes has increased across the Western world, so has the activity on file-sharing services.

….Rosen suggested one possible scenario for recouping lost sales from online piracy would be to impose a type of fee on ISPs that could be passed on to their customers who frequent these file-swapping services.

….Rosen’s other suggestions for fighting online piracy were more conciliatory.

She urged the major music labels, which include Sony Music, Warner Music, EMI, Universal Music and Bertelsmann’s BMG, to ease licensing restrictions, develop digital copyright protections for music, and invest more in promoting subscription download services.

Pressplay and MusicNet, the online services backed by the majors, plus independent legitimate services such as Britain’s Wippit.com, sounded somewhat optimistic about their longterm chances to derail free services such as Kazaa and Morpheus.

But they also acknowledged they cannot compete with the “free” players until the labels clear up the licensing morass that keeps new songs from being distributed online for a fee. [Reuters]

Some have been discussing a new “compulsory” license attached to Internet access, and possibly to blank CDs, CD burners, etc., as a method of providing revenue to content creators. This movement would certainly be greatly aided by RIAA support.