Point 1: Fans do a better job than the music industry at getting music out and listened to.
“…If we want to build a Library of Alexandria for our global musical heritage, it’s the file sharing fans that will build it for us.”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has suggested since 2003 that “voluntary collective licensing” be implemented in the music industry in order to minimize lawsuits and ensure that artists and copyright holders are given fair compensation for their work. In their plan, if the music industry were to form collecting agencies that offered filesharers the opportunity to “get legit”, music would continue to be distributed throughout the world and everyone would get their paycheck. More simply, the EFF wants people who like Mediafire, Spotify, and Rhapsody to pay less than $10 a month to do whatever they want with the music they have. Copyright holders and artists would be paid according to the popularity of their music, leading them to encourage people to keep sharing their music files. This model would encourage new competition among filesharing applications and software developers, as well as form a new bond between the creators and the consumers of digital music. Luckily, this idea has already been implemented in broadcast radio since the early 20th century, so there’s a lot of precedent for how well it works.
Point 2: The government doesn’t need to place in the music industry.
“…Any solution should minimize government intervention in favor of market forces.”
The RIAA claimed to stop suing individual consumers for digital music copyright infringement in the mid-2000s for a reason- it wasn’t profitable anymore. The time and energy it takes to drag a case through the US legal system costs more than the couple million defendants are required to pay in damages, chump change for the music industry. Under the EFF’s plan, the only reason the government would need to get involved with filesharing is to be a threat to those who would potentially try and avoid paying fees to share their music. Additionally, this plan would provide Internet providers with a new incentive to bundle with their monthly package, as well as increase market competition because of that fact. This plan is similar to the one proposed by the RIAA in 2004 that offered amnesty to illegal filesharers who paid them a fee. The mechanisms to monitor the popularity of each music file and eventually divvy up the payments to the copyright holders would create an entirely new Internet market in itself.