The talk of the SXSW festival in Texas was about a proposed fee for filesharing. The idea is that ISPs may soon begin adding a small fee onto Internet users’ monthly bills. This fee would then go to the music industry to compensate for losses from filesharing.

Of course, none of the money the RIAA gets in lawsuits goes to actual music artists, so it’s likely that this fee will end up the same way. A similar idea was proposed in Canada but shot down because it makes no sense.

For a start, not everyone uses filesharing programs, so you can’t work out who should pay and who shouldn’t. There is talk of this fee being optional. If users pay, they would then be “legit” and able to do all the filesharing they want.

We can’t imagine how such an idea could ever be workable. It would require highly sophisticated levels of monitoring and it could effectively run online music stores out of business.

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