Having moved to the Isle of Man in August 08, I have come to learn so much about this Island in the North Irish Sea. The Isle of Man usually seems to make the news when Alister Darling calls it a tax haven…

But there is so much innovation on this island.

The people I have meet in the short time I have been here, has been inspiring!

Then I came across this article from the International Herald Tribune written by Eric Pfanner

The island, a rainy outpost in the Irish Sea, is promoting an offbeat remedy for digital piracy, which the record companies blame for billions of dollars in lost sales. Instead of fighting file-sharing, the government wants to embrace it – and it is trying to enlist a skeptical music industry in support.

Under a proposal announced this month, the 80,000 people who live on the Isle of Man would be able to download unlimited amounts of music – perhaps even from notorious peer-to-peer pirate sites. To make this possible, broadband subscribers would have to pay a nominal fee of as little as £1, or $1.37, a month to their Internet service providers.

Ron Berry, director of inward investment for the Isle of Man, said the music industry needed radical approaches because of the “utter failure” of its current strategies. Global music sales have fallen nearly 25 percent since 2000. And despite a nearly decade-long anti-piracy campaign, the industry’s international trade group estimates that 95 percent of tracks distributed over the Internet are pirated, generating no revenue at all for the record companies.

“A lot of people in the business are concerned with how much money they are losing, but not with how much money they could make,” Berry said.

Under his proposal, the money collected by the Internet providers would be sent to a special agency that would distribute the proceeds to the copyright owners, including the record labels and music publishers. They would receive payments based on how often their music was downloaded or streamed over the Internet, as they now do in many countries when it is performed live or on the radio.

The Isle of Man didn’t invent the idea. The concept of a so-called blanket license to distribute music in digital form has been discussed since the days when Napster, before its rebirth as a legal service, thumbed its nose at the music industry.

Read the full article here

If you have heard any follow up to this please would you let me know…

Thanks