When Aziz Ridouan was growing up in a low-income housing project in the Loire Valley, he spent so much time on his computer that his family thought he didn't have any friends. In fact, he had tons of them – online. Now the 18-year-old high school student heads the Association des Audionautes, an organization of 6,000 Web junkies that has made peer-to-peer file-sharing an issue in France's upcoming presidential election. Under a plan that would compensate artists through a surcharge on Internet service provider fees, the group aims to make France the first country to legalize file-sharing. Think of it as Ascap for the P2P era.
Ascap, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, is the US organization that collects royalties and pays songwriters for broadcasts, webcasts, and live performances. Ridouan's system would work much the same way: ISPs would charge a few extra euros per month and grant users a license for unlimited P2P downloading. "It's not revolutionary at all," maintains Jean-Baptiste Soufron, the Audionautes' legal counsel. Indeed, the idea has its roots in the 1847 case of Ernest Bourget, a songwriter who refused to pay his tab at a Paris café because its orchestra was playing his works without permission. The court ruled that Bourget had to pay for his drinks, but the café had to pay for his music. This prompted the establishment in 1850 of Sacem, the world's first agency to collect performance royalties. The idea spread to the US, and Ascap was founded in 1914.
The major music companies equate Ridouan's proposal with legitimizing piracy, but they don't mention they collect more than two-thirds of every dollar from online and CD sales. Under such a licensing scheme, they could get just one-fourth.
Ridouan has won many over to his cause – including one of France's two leading presidential candidates – by appealing to the French love of culture as something beyond mere product. "Our parents certainly had the right to trade cassettes and to record movies on VHS," Ridouan wrote in a recent op-ed article in the establishment daily Le Monde. "Must we be considered digital sub-citizens?" – Frank Rose
Music Reborn
>
