Cannes - A top music executive has
said that telecommunications
companies and internet service
providers (ISPs) will be asked to pay
up for giving their customers access to
free song-swapping sites.
The music industry is in a tailspin with
global sales of CDs expected to fall six percent in
2003, its fourth consecutive
annual decline. A major culprit, industry watchers
say, is online piracy.
Now, the industry wants to hit the problem at its
source - internet service
providers.
"We will hold ISPs more accountable," said Hillary
Rosen, chairman and
CEO the Recording Industry Association of America
(RIAA), in her keynote
speech at the Midem music conference on the French
Riviera.
"Let's face it. They know there's a lot of demand
for broadband simply
because of the availability (of file-sharing),"
Rosen said.
As broadband access in homes has increased across
the Western world, so
has the activity on file-sharing services.
Impossible to enforce
The RIAA is a powerful trade body that has taken a
number of file-swapping
services, including the now defunct Napster, to
court in an effort to shut them
down.
Rosen suggested one possible scenario for recouping
lost sales from online
piracy would be to impose a type of fee on ISPs that
could be passed on to
their customers who frequent these file-swapping
services.
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