Julianna Yau’s blog

In response to the Songwriters Association of Canada’s proposal for the monetization of file sharing, Mathew Ingram asks “Would you pay an Internet “tax” for music?”. Although Ingram is skeptical of people being open to the idea, and the post’s comments are riddled with the usual indignant grouches, the proposal is a much better solution than the law suits happening in the US. Being, at this point, a proposal, I think it shows SAC has a good understanding of the direction in which we should be headed.

I’m actually a big fan of PlayLouder, an ISP in the UK which caters specifically to users who want to download music freely. PlayLouder tracks the downloads of music through their gateway to calculate the amount of royalties which should be repaid to creators. The royalties are paid by part of the monthly subscription fee a user pays for their internet service. Although the tracking has privacy issues to be resolved, it has great potential as long as everything is handled properly.

Why more ISPs don’t take this approach is a mystery to me.  This allows users to pay one fee and download to their hearts’ content, rather than paying for their internet service plus a subscription to a music download service or a pay-per-download service. The ISP then doesn’t have to worry about the mess of divulging the accounts attached to IP addresses. And, gasp!, the creators get paid for their work!

Rogers, for example, already has different internet packages catering to the different speed requirements of the user. It doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to add a Music Lovers package with a monthly fee which includes a levy for the music downloading activity. This would allow users to opt out of the levy if they decide to buy music from another source, but also allows users to have the choice of downloading music without additional costs or having to steal the music.

And, hey, if we want to be really innovative, we could extend the same type of package to movie watchers!

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One Laptop Per Child has posted their projected delivery dates for the Give 1 Get 1 program. I’m not actually sure when the dates were posted, but it seems quite recent. The dates are currently for the US, and the Canadian dates will follow. Donated laptops are targeted to arrive in early 2008.

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Yesterday, Facebook issued an apology for the poor product launch of Facebook Beacon and added the option for users to block all Beacon updates in the “Privacy Settings for External Websites” portion of their privacy settings page.

I’m sorry that Beacon was so poorly launched. I enjoy sharing my activities with my friends (to their amusement or annoyance), sending updates on the movies I’ve watched, blog postings I’ve written, books I’m reading and websites I’ve visited, and creating about a bajillion status updates. Being extremely concerned about privacy,  I also enjoy having full control over exactly what is shared with my friends. It seems Beacon could have been much better received if they were more transparent about how it works, and more proactive about giving users control over the updates from day 1.

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