The music industry looks to ISPs instead of lawsuits

As reported in Friday's Wall Street Journal, the music industry has apparently given up on suing 13-year olds and dead people in its quest to stem music piracy. Instead, it plans to work with ISPs to identify and notify copyright infringers of the need to come clean:

[T]he Recording Industry Association of America said it plans to try an approach that relies on the cooperation of Internet-service providers. The trade group said it has hashed out preliminary agreements with major ISPs under which it will send an email to the provider when it finds a provider's customers making music available online for others to take.

Depending on the agreement, the ISP will either forward the note to customers, or alert customers that they appear to be uploading music illegally, and ask them to stop. If the customers continue the file-sharing, they will get one or two more emails, perhaps accompanied by slower service from the provider. Finally, the ISP may cut off their access altogether.

Cory Doctorow, among others, has sharply criticized such an ISP partnership in the past, but I see it as a big step up from the industry's current tactics, and one that could lead to other possible solutions like a music tax at the ISP level. TechDirt doesn't like this option, but it's unclear what other (good) options the industry has.

Throttling downloads at their source - i.e., the ISP that provides the bandwidth - is at least the right area in which to target the activity. Whether a tax or some other solution ends up working matters less than that the industry is now focused on the right piece of the piracy puzzle.

[deepwave]

Or maybe just maybe, the record industry needs to wake up, get with the times and find a profitable, alternative business model just like the software industry had/has to. How about music discovery and full service gig organization? Or what about a music-as-a-service style model?

[jrepenning]

Prosecuting their customers was always a bizarrely ludicrous strategy, yes. But "working with ISPs" is not necessarily a step up. Take ACTA, an international trade agreement requiring ISPs to freely grant copyright holders rights (like monitoring and service cancellation) that wouldn't be granted police in murder cases. ACTA was pushed by the US, and is now besmirching our reputation throughout the world as it rolls out to all our "friends," without ever being discussed publicly here. It's the regulation Cory Doctrow wrote about, as you link here and blogged earlier.

[hlainchb]

The internet is tough on outdated business models. Taking money from artists to fund lawsuits against grannies and kids is an outdated business model and hopefully will run its course soon. Charging people for specific internet activities will be tricky but here in Canada we are charged for blank CD media for under a similar tax, even if we use it for data (who really burns music CDs anymore?), so anything's possible!

[Expatriot]

Let's talk about how this in an open source context. Music, software and the other materials that are being downloaded illegally via the internet are not open source any more than your postings here are... they protected by copyright that should be respected. Surely you would be justifiably outraged if your writings were used without being attributed.

Any illegal downloading is theft, pure and simple. I know in this age of political correctness and moral equivalence we aren't supposed to call it that or call the people who do it thieves, but strip away all the b.s. about illegal downloading being okay because of the outrageous, if legal way the the music companies and others conduct their businesses and that's what you have... their property being stolen. Except in the scale of their thievery, the people doing it are otherwise no different than Jeff Skilling of Enron or confessed Ponzi scam artist Bernie Madoff.

It is more than a little ironic that illegal downloading of music is minimized by most people on the premise that the music companies are screwing everybody. As but one example of this line of thinking, consider "Lawsuits or not, the RIAA still doesn't understand us" - CNET - The Digital Home
(http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10127017-17.html?tag=mncol;title). There are few industries in the world more open to the potential for radical change than the music industry: the means to professionally record music, the means to cheaply distribute it widely to everyone at whatever price one chooses, and the means to publicize it at almost no cost are all available to virtually everyone who has the talent and desire thanks to the internet and cheap or free software, some of which is open source.

The big mystery is the complicity of some of our biggest institutions in encouraging this illegal behavior through their indifference, even when it potentially affects them directly. Consider that the author of the above-noted piece works for CBS. How is it in CBS's interest to have an employee openly defending the theft of copyrighted materials?

Unfortunately, the problem starts well before them. It's a fair assumption to think Mr.