According to Wired, three of the majors are on board for a new licensing programme which could be a forerunner of the much previously touted idea where customers pay a monthly music licence fee to their ISP, which is then passed onto the record companies, in return for permission to access and share music in anyway they wish, including P2P networks like Limewire.
The potentially ground breaking system is currently confined to US universities, and is part of a bid by American colleges to protect their file-sharing students from copyright infringement lawsuits, and themselves from being accused of authorising infringement as the internet providers to their students. The proposal is that a licence fee will be bundled into tuition fees, which will be passed on to a not-for-profit body called Choruss who will in turn pay the content owners, ie record labels and publishers.
Choruss has been created by internet consultant Jim Griffin, who has been specifically consulting on net affairs for Warner Music, though the new organisation will not be Warner biased in any way. All the majors bar the biggest - Universal Music - are said to be on board.
It's not clear how Choruss would track what music was being accessed over the university networks in order to pass the right share of the licence income to the record companies, especially the indies, nor how transferable the model would be to the public at large via a levy charged by ISPs. The proposals are, nevertheless, quite interesting.