This is a solution?

Many years ago, griping from the music industry resulted in a fee, attached to any blank cassette tape, which is supposed to compensate the music industry for any illegal copies of their music. It doesn't matter if you want to record a business meeting, birds in your back yard, or even to tape yourself singing in the shower - you pay the fee. From time to time I have heard people use this as a rationalization for the bootleg copies they have made - they ask, "Why should it be illegal to do this, when I already paid the fee when I bought the tape?"

Now, in the New York Times, a Harvard law professor tells the music industry to consider getting with the times and, rather than suing people who download music and trying to avoid the new market for downloading, creating some form of blanket license for its recordings.

To its credit, the industry has started to participate in paid music download services like iTunes, but a better solution would be to institute a monthly licensing fee paid by Internet users.

So, beyond the blank tape where you are ostensibly paying a small fee to make up for somebody else's piracy, this professor suggests that it would be a fair compromise to declare that if you want Internet access you should pay a full license fee for all music.

Apparently this professor is not familiar with the copyright and licensing issues involved in music - where there can be many copyright owners for even a single song, based upon authorship, the participation of multiple artists, sampling, and other such considerations - which would cloud the issue of compensation. Or perhaps he only cares that the music conglomerates "get their money", and is less concerned about the artists. But no matter what he intends, if his licensing scheme were implemented and an Internet user were asked, "How much music will you download now that you are required to pay a full licensing fee just to access the Internet?", a fair answer would be, "All of it."