Well, after writing this piece advocating a flat-rate music purchase model a year ago, today I was very pleasantly surprised to see that the likelihood of this happening seems to be increasing.
Today, that quality IT-related news site The Register published this article.
It seems that under threat of UK government legislation, the music industry has finally seen sense and smelled the coffee: attempting to get the ISP’s to do their dirty work of sending ‘3 strikes and you’re out’ letters to suspected copyright infringers was just not going to work. ISP’s didn’t want to get involved in this nasty, costly and potentially risky business on behalf of the music industry: they would have been losing their own customers in the process and gaining nothing. And the music industry knows the cost of chasing suspected infringers, with the possible sting-in-the-tail of being keel-hauled in the courts by the suspected infringers trying to prove what they claim.
As they say, the devil is in the detail, so we’ll wait and see how the final implementation looks, but so far, this looks potentially quite promising.