A Solid Call 2.0

: Harvard's William Fisher has written "A royalties plan for file sharing" based on unique file names. It sounds dubious to me. He seeks to tax ISPs and Hardware manufacturers rather than consumers. Assuming that people don't change file names, then presumably, it's up to the ISPs to either charge heavier users more or find the break-even flat rate point. (I got the humorous mental image of telcos getting taxed everytime a phone conversation included a copywritten joke) I'm generally in favor of ISPs being common carriers who are agnostic and blind to what's going through their pipes. It's also unclear if hardware manufacturers will be taxed before their devices are used or after. Both hardware-taxing options seem fundamentally problematic. There may be something to this idea, but the real innovation will be in the details.