THE UK’S royalty collecting body the Performing Rights Society for Music (PRS) has released a paper that it reckons will both boost digital Britain and empower music creators, not to mention line the pockets of its membership.

The brainstrust at the PRS thinks that if anyone will get hurt by the Digital Economy Act it will be the music artists that it represents. As opposed, we presume, to those ordinary people who have been or will be sent threatening letters from lawyers with no case, or the Internet service providers that will have to pick up the DEA dogmess left at their feet by Parliament.

PRS has ‘launched’ - we’d prefer to call it ‘chucked’ - a paper that argues for ensuring that its members in the music extortion cartel industry are properly compensated for illegal filesharing.

Presumably not happy with its own use of the word ‘launch’, the PRS settled down a bit and decided that it was only ‘circulating’ its discussion paper “Moving Digital Britain Forward Without Leaving Creative Britain Behind’ to artists and rightsholders.

Lucky recipients that find the paper dropped onto their mirrored desk will be treated to the news that the PRS, whose job it is to get money for artists, thinks that artists should be getting more money.

“PRS for Music offer all stakeholders in the content and connectivityindustries a new solution to the perennial problem of media piracy by introducing incentives, through compensation, that can benefit both content and connectivity industries”, the organisation said in a statement.

The group believes that once the scale of so-called ‘piracy’ is measured, thanks to the magical DEA, it can be priced. At its heart is the idea that ISPs pay some sort of fee for the amount of ‘piracy’ - by which we think it really means copyright infringement rather than robbery, murder and rapine in the high seas - that happens through their doors. Something that is sure to find favour amongst Internet service providers that until now probably had never realised that they were responsible for keeping George Micheal in cars and Elton John in hairpieces.

Will Page, chief economist at PRS for Music and author of the paper hummed, “What co-author David Touve and I have been working on developing are market-based solutions to the harm caused by illegal file sharing over the Internet. More importantly, we explore what legal options exist for recovering the value of that harm, and offer an economic framework that can be considered when structuring a resolution”.

Groovy. µ

Source:The Inquirer