UC Berkeley Students Explore ISP Tax for Legal Campus File-Sharing

Masters thesis examines proposals to allow P2P in exchange for a monthly fee that ISPs would collect and make available to copyright holders based on individual artists’ download rates. Matt Earp and Andrew McDiarmid, recent graduates of the UC Berkeley School of Information, have written an interesting masters thesis in which they construct a "working model of what a voluntary collective licensing scheme would look like in a 'real world' network, in this case at UC Berkeley." Called "An Investigation of Voluntary Collective Licensing for Music File-Sharing at UC Berkeley," they developed a model for how licensed file-sharing might look on the campus network by considering the needs and practices of three groups of stakeholders: consumers of digital music (undergraduates); ISPs (network administrators); and digital music providers and music technology professionals. Investigating the needs of these stakeholders with respect to their theses was an "effort in triangulation." Their theses. </img>


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