Plenty of ink has been spilled in arguments over the proper business model for music in the P2P age. The publishers generally want to hold onto the current market-based system, but there are voices in the wilderness arguing that a compulsory license model actually makes the most sense for both artists and consumers. One of those voices is Steven Page, singer and guitarist for the Barenaked Ladies, who recently spoke to Ars about this issue and called for an ISP-based licensing model that would allow consumers access to all the music they want and would ensure that artists get paid. But the US Register of Copyrights, Marybeth Peters, calls this a bad idea.

Here's the idea: compulsory licenses allow anyone to take advantage of whatever works are covered by the license without obtaining the permissions that would otherwise be required. It is essentially an exception made to copyright law that takes away a person's right to control how copies of their material are handled. This doesn't mean a compulsory license is free, though, only that the rate is determined by statute.

The best known of these in the US is the mechanical license. Songwriters and their publishers receive this rate—currently set at $.091 per song—for every copy of an album sold that features their song. Music labels are free to negotiate a lower rate, and many do (75 percent of the mechanical rate is common), but they can simply choose to pay the mechanical royalty rate without negotiations.

But will it happen? The nation's top copyright official, Marybeth Peters, said at a recent LexisNexis/Variety DRM conference that it's not something she wants to see. "I hope we don't go to a system of compulsory licenses," she said. "I don't see how any creator benefits from a compulsory license." None of the other industry executives expressed much love for the plan, either, arguing that the market would work out all of its current interoperability problems on its own, and that a compulsory license would stifle innovation.

But Page is adamant. "We need to get our music where our fans want it," he says, "not the other way around."

I've been talking about blanket licensing in regard to music downloads for a long time now. I think it is a good idea, but I don't like the ISP based model suggested here. What about people who use the Internet and are not interested in downloading music? It's not fair to those people, and those people do exist in large numbers. It would just create an unfair situation to replace our current unworkable situation.

I think where we really need blanket compulsory licensing is at the level of the music downloading services and applications. If anyone who is building a P2P application or a music downloading service can get legitimate rights to do so, the market for music online will diversity, grow, and change as we want it to. We would see different approaches to providing music online if everyone who wanted to could open their own music downloading service.

We really want the reporting about what is being downloaded to be as specific as possible. We don't want to take the approach PROs take to radio, and dole out royalties based upon sampling what is present in the P2P networks. That type of system has a disproportional benefit to larger artists.

In order to get the desired level of specific reporting of downloads at the ISP level, we would have to institute what amounts to total monitoring of Internet connections. We don't want that kind of infrastructure to even exist at the ISP level, as it would eventually be horribly abused. Let music downloading services and applications handle that role.