I have just read an interesting article by Andrew Dubber: http://newmusicstrategies.com/2008/03/23/michael-arrington-is-not-an-idiot/ which I felt compelled to comment against and have continued thinking about. To this end I wanted to continue the conversation here an expand on my thoughts a little.

I feel that it is essential that artists are rewarded fairly for their creative input into the social networking sites. These sites should be responsible for the content they hold and either remove infringing content or pay a proportional fee to the copyright holders (royalties). If there continues to be a free-for-all attitude towards intellectual property then standards will decline as fewer people will wish / be able to participate in generating quality content. To me this is worse case scenario as music lover / musician / blogger interested in music.

In my opinion the current state of affairs – where websites ignore that their users are breaching copyright terms cannot continue for too long… Therefore I hope that one of the industry giants (step up google / yahoo etc) will deliver a mechanism where websites (including social networking sites) have access to media catalogues and will be expected to pay on behalf of their user a micro-payment per play.  This will indeed put a burden on websites, but avoids getting the lawyers involved and washing their dirty laundry in public.

Heres hoping.