Kazaa, Verizon Propose Compulsory Music Licensing

akb writes "USA Today is reporting on an interesting new alliance between Kazaa, the dominant file sharing network, and Verizon, a company with revenues of $67 billion. The two companies are floating a proposal to ISPs and the computer and manufacturing industries to lobby to force the music industry to license their music. Royalties would be payed to artists directly, thus circumventing the stranglehold the RIAA has on the music industry."

Comments

What about writers?

[wytcld]

If somehow we're going to tax the Net and distribute it to musicians (by what formula?), how about another tax to be distributed to writers? And what about visual artists? How about erotic visual artists?

Let's be honest about it: music is just a branch of the sex industry. (Okay, we still have military music too, but you're downloading that, right?) So if we don't want a tax supporting the sex industry, we should probably disallow erotic artists, whether visual or aural. Still, shouldn't Net users everywhere pay a tax to subsidize the valuable time /.'s writers invest in the insightful (hint) public service of posts just like this one!
___