PC Pro reports that “P2P downloads made up 18 per cent of the digital tunes, with a further 11 per cent copied from friends’ CDs’; 65 per cent were ripped from purchased CDs with the remaining six per cent from paid-for download” in the UK. The study was done by British Music Rights (BMR), “an umbrella organisation representing a number of composers’, songwriters’ and music publishers’ bodies.”

These numbers seem to be a bit low for me, but this is not the point now. BMR wishes to use these numbers to push for a licence fee collected from hardware manufacturers and ISPs. I quess I can understand that, this is where cash is abundant, fight for a stake where there is a bounty.

But, the name they have coined:Value Recognition Right, is a telling us about an intent of making telcos and ISP’ part of the content value chain. This not only is damaging of Net Neutrality, but serious intrusion of the privacy of the users. Someone watching my packages, peeping into whether they are part of an illegal mp3, and metering these packages? Lobbying for rent seeking, instead of trying to create economic/legal/cultural models to gain revenue on the right of their own? Come on, this is plain wrong.