So there was an article on torrentfreak about Kim Dotcom suggesting, via his twitter feed, that the music industry has a few key points to overcome as a means to reduce piracy.

The RIANZ responded and basically said, suing for copyright infringement under 3-strikes law and basically making examples of people is the only way to stop piracy.

So i sent this letter to the RIANZ.

I doubt they would take any notice, but im with Kim on this one - i dont want itunes, I personally think it wastes ram. But i would like to legally download music from the pirate bay - and so would many of our subscribers as it means i can still use my usb stick in the car (the only place i listen to music)


What do you guys think of my proposed solution:

An Open Letter to RIANZ

 

I am Ray Taylor, managing director of a small ISP providing broadband to rural hawkes bay.

This morning I have been reading the story linked below, about some statements made by RIANZ in response to those of Kim Dotcom.

http://torrentfreak.com/record-labels-correct-dotcom-only-way-to-stop-piracy-is-suing-file-sharers-130118/

The note that suing file sharers is the only way to discourage piracy is a problem. It is virtually impossible to find a customer who has been illegally downloading on our network, and the government’s recent three strikes law can be technically impossible to follow and identify an internet subscriber.

We use Carrier Grade NAT on our network – this is because ip addresses are running out and APNIC is no longer issuing new subnets to ISP’s.

A typical notice sent by a rights holder would ask us to forward it on to the customer based on the public ip address supplied by said rights holder.

Because all of our customers share ip addresses dynamically, with multiple customers behind the same ip address at any one time, we are unable to tell from a notice containing a public ip address which customer was downloading illegally. About half of our customers have their own public ip address, and the other half run behind carrier grade NAT connections. A couple of other major ISP’s in NZ now do this also because of a lack of IPv4 address space.

However I would like to propose a simple solution that would probably net more income for RIANZ to distribute to rights holders, based on a Canadian model.

In Canada, all blank music cd’s have a small tax attached to them when sold. This tax is used for your Canadian counterpart to distribute to rights holders for the music that will be burned to those blank cd’s.

CD’s are not common anymore and I think this is now slightly out-dated. My car stereo uses a usb thumb drive that plugs into the front of the head unit, rather than cd’s. I don’t want an ipod and itunes is a waste of RAM on my computer.

 

I would like to therefore propose the following:
All ISP’s in New Zealand should be able to sell an add-on subscription on behalf of RIANZ.

Internet subscribers would be able to purchase a “RIANZ Download Subscription” add on to their internet service, entitling them to a simple flat rate of unlimited music downloads from whichever source they decide. This would mean that websites such as the pirate bay can bring in income for RIANZ, via a simple subscription that prevents the consumer from being sued under three-strikes law. Should the end user decide to use another service such as itunes, then the subscription sold by the isp would not be needed.

The subscription would only need to cover artists represented by RIANZ and have a 10% mark up retained by the ISP for their administration services, as well as an incentive for the ISP to sell the add-on subscription when telemarketing or adding new customers. The isp would forward payments to RIANZ and I suggest a retail value of $10 per month, or $120 per year would be a suitable amount that personally I would be happy to pay as a consumer.

RIANZ could then distribute the subscription fees to artists using the same algorithms that are used for low power FM radio music licenses. I understand this to be based on commercial radio play rates.

Anyhow I doubt you would be interested in pursuing such a venture in the near future, but would like you to know that Taylor Communications is open to partnering for a trial.

 

 

Ray Taylor
Taylor Communications