There’s a short piece over on wired about an EFF proposal to handle the legality of file sharing. It’s a basic system I’ve proposed before – have all ISP customers pay (or opt to pay in this case) a small monthly fee, in return for which they can file share to their heart’s content. The money goes into a pool that’s payed out to the artists on the basis of popularity. I love this idea. I think it neatly handles the issue of compensating the artists, it sidesteps the middlemen (the big music companies) and it would enable a broader and more diverse sharing environment as the small indie artists could start to actually earn money, whereas right now they’re basically locked out of the music industry. Plus it emulates a model that’s already known to work, ie Canada where a large surtax is paid on recordable media to compensate the industry for the music you’re presumably copying.