New Details About Major Label's P2P Licensing Plan

Warner Music Group hopes to charge people a flat fee for all the music they care to download from peer-to-peer sites. The label will not sue anyone who pays the fee. Other than that, it doesn't have much of a plan.

Questions such as whether indie artists and labels will get their fair share, who will oversee the proper collection and disbursement of royalties, and whether people who don't download music will have to pay the fee remain to be answered. The label itself doesn't yet know the answers. A senior executive at Warner told Wired.com's Frank Rose (pictured),
"What remains to be sorted out is basically everything."

What is known is that Jim Griffin has been hired by Warner to create "an ASCAP for the internet, collecting fees from ISPs and divvying them up among rights holders." In the same way that diners pay restaurant's music licensing fees with each dish they order, ISP customers would pay a bit more per month for the right to download as much music as their hard drives can eat.

BigChampagne, which already sells data about what is being traded on P2P
services to the major labels, could be tapped to provide the necessary data to splitthe money up fairly – assuming that's one of the project's goals.

Details of a controversial plan to make money from music piracy are beginning to emerge.

Spearheaded by Warner Music Group, the plan aims to get internetservice providers to pay a few dollars per user per month into a fundthat would then be divided among rights holders. The scheme wouldessentially give P2P users a get-out-of-jail-free card for file sharingactivity.

Wired.com has learned that industry consultant Jim Griffin, hired by Warner to implement the idea,
has already set up an independent company to act as a digital-rightsclearinghouse. Griffin's company would be like an ASCAP for theinternet, collecting fees from ISPs and divvying them up among rightsholders.

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Photo courtesy Frank Rose