Warner Pushes for Blanket Music License

In the past few weeks, Warner Music Group has begun to heavily push the idea of creating an ‘opt-in’ blanket license for schools and universities, allowing students at those universities to download and share music without the fear of being sued.  According to the plan, Warner would then have a non-profit group administer the money paid by the universities on behalf of those downloads to the non-profit and re-distribute it “proportionally to content-holders.”

Sounds fishy.

There are a couple of stipulations to this plan that raise a number of red flags.

In one of the eight slides, Warner lists these two points as “Possible Complications”

• Simplest if accepted by all Higher Education and ISPs
• If not must avoid massive leakage from those that are covered to others that are not

First, it seems incredibly unlikely that this blanket licensing scheme would be accepted by all Higher Education and ISPs so therefore the universities must avoid the massive leakages.  That fundamentally opposes the nature of file-sharing and illegal downloading.  In the age of mixtapes, yes, you primarily shared music with friends and family; in the information age, people download entire discographies from closed communities based in Sweden, grab songs from LimeWire and other P2P networks and then what?  You leave those programs open and share your recent acquisitions with complete strangers who may or may not be your fellow classmates.

Now, I could see the university finding a way around that, namely by restricting upload speeds or going in and manually disabling uploads with bittorrent and P2P programs, but what about the 50% of students that live in off-campus housing?  To spring a leak, they have to do is download at school, head home and boot up their computer.

To me, that’s just one of many flaws with the plan.  Mike Masnick of Techdirt offers a great analysis of some of the other flaws — pegging it a Music Tax and giving detailed points on why we should resist it.  I strongly suggest the post here.

What do yall think?