The solution to the Copyright problem
Copying is now free, uncontrollable and unlimited.
Copyright should be replaced by the author and artists basic right to get paid for their work.
The payment should happen through a collective licence fee that all households should pay. Approximately £5 per month will bring us a large way there.
The Government needs to then guarantee all authors and artists that the collected money is distributed fairly and directly to artists and authors. This will be based on very precise statistics on file sharing, on independent statistics made at file download and streaming portals (independent statistics at Youtube, Flickr, Google Books, Last.fm and at more such sites). Those statistics will also be made by hundreds of thousands of volunteer Internet users who will have installed Last.fm type of scrobling software which monitors the number of playbacks of music, video, even of text in the browser and reports that to the central statistics systems.
The Government will have responsabillity to make sure that all works of art, all articles, all texts, photos everything is catalogued and even backed up by the state as a means to safeguard a copy of everything as it being the national cultural heritage. Based on this database, digital and analog fingerprints are generated on all works. And thus every single use of these works of art can be identified and the artist or author can be compensated.
We need to admit that the issue here is to remove the established music labels, movie studios and publishor’s grip on the cultural industry revenues. We need to think about the artists and the authors and not about the intermediaries. We need to admit that these last 10 years have been a struggle by the old established majors to hold on to their multi billion pound yearly revenues. We need to recognize that the Internet is here to remove all intermediaries in the cultural industries. The faster we as a society admit it, the sooner cultural expansion will flourish on the Internet leading to much better arts and much better culture in general.
I have been saying this since 2006 and before: http://charbax.com/2007/12/19/studios-know-they-are-going-to-be-toast-on-the-internet/
I posted this as a comment at http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/311/CommentKey:287082