The Isle of man are about to Legalise Piracy – for a flat fee of £1 a month! Sounds too good to be true? Read on…
Under a proposal announced this month, the 80,000 people who live on the Isle of Man would be able to download unlimited amounts of music — perhaps even from notorious peer-to-peer pirate sites. To make this possible, broadband subscribers would pay a nominal fee of as little as £1, or $1.38, a month to their Internet service providers.
Ron Berry, director of inward investment for the Isle of Man, said the music industry needed radical approaches because of the “utter failure” of its current strategies. Global music sales have fallen nearly 25 percent since 2000.
Despite nearly a decade of campaigning against piracy, the industry’s international trade group estimates, 95 percent of tracks distributed online are pirated, generating no revenue for the recording companies.
“A lot of people in the business are concerned with how much money they are losing, but not with how much money they could make,” Mr. Berry said.
Under his proposal, the money collected by the Internet providers would be sent to a special agency that would distribute the proceeds to the copyright owners, including the record labels and music publishers. They would receive payments based on how often their music was downloaded or streamed over the Internet, as they now do in many countries when it is performed live or on the radio.
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