In DRM we trust: world collection societies wring hands over P2P copying:CISAC, the worldwide body that represents collection societies, held a two-day conference in Brussels on Thursday and Friday to tackle a thorny question: how do artists get paid in a digital world?

CISAC is the International Confederation of Authors and Composers Societies, a meta-collection society that has the distinction of having booted Russia's ROMS out of the group after ROMS isued a blanket music license to AllOfMP3.com several years ago. The various collection societies that make up CISAC patrol the globe, collecting payments from restaurants and retail stores that play music while shoppers shop and diners eat (among other things; it's quite a varied group). That money is collected and then distributed to artists--but CISAC is concerned that digital technology and file-sharing are eviscerating revenues.

These societies administer licenses under which users who pay the appropriate license fee can play as much music as they want for their customers. A restaurant, for instance, might pay an annual fee to play recorded music; that money is then distributed to individual performers based on a set of byzantine formulas, market sampling statistics, and the sacrifice of a goat.

In an interview with the Register, CISAC's director general expressed strong opposition to extending this licensing scheme to home computer users. The proposal is that all broadband users in a country might pay a yearly fee as part of their broadband bill and then could download as much music as they like, from whatever source they like. The revenue would be then be parceled out to artists, who might stand to make plenty if everyone paid a small(ish) fee. It's not a new idea: Barenaked Ladies guitarist Steven Page thinks this is the right approach, and it's been suggested by others who see it as the solution to the file-sharing problem.

Eric Baptiste of CISAC believes that this proposal is utterly unworkable, though, and in the interview called for strengthening the current system under which each home user pays for each product (a song or album) at a price set by that song's owner. The great disadvantage of the current system is that it requires a massive enforcement regime to keep people from trading music without paying each time they do so, and enforcement isn't working so well. Baptiste believes that more technology and more DRM could solve the problem.

Perhaps he should have listened to some of the other speakers at the conference, like British Telecom's CEO Ben Verwaayen. "Regardless of your moral outrage, people will continue to download on peer-to-peer networks," Verwaayen said in his speech, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Mark Selby of Nokia said that "the current situation is a nonsense. It is like arguing over the color of your stable lock long after the horse has bolted. If anyone believes that technology can offer total protection, they are living on another planet."

(Read Original Article - Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.)