Shogun

Techdirt founder Mike Masnick has followed the twists and turns of the digital music debate for more than a decade, offering some of the most prescient and lucid information and arguments on the topic anywhere. Today he tackles growing calls for a voluntary music-licensing scheme, pushed most recently by Warner Music Group to universities, that would basically allow file sharing by having ISPs impose a surcharge on all users to be paid out to copyright holders. (A version of this has been done before with blank media like tape cassettes in some markets, including Canada, but this would be a massive expansion of the idea.)

Mike's take is not the final word on the matter, but it should be required reading for anyone interested in understanding where music is today and where it is headed. It is reproduced with permission below in its entirety. As he ably argues, the future of music is often confused with the future of the music business — but they are not the same thing at all. In fact, the interests of the music business, defined primarily as the major recording labels, is arguably one of the biggest impediments to moving music itself forward.

http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/...irts-mike.html