MAKING USERS PAY FOR THEIR ENTERTAINMENT

The free ride could be over. The rise in popularity of peer-to-peer servers and torrents, free access to copyrighted material from porn to music that is fairly simple for even the most basic computer user to interact with, may be near its zenith.

When Napster went legitimate it pioneered the way for peer-to-peers to become profitable mechanisms for business. Apple's itunes has shown that people will pay for the tunes they want.

Apparently 85% of available bandwidth is used for piracy. Wicked! Imagine if your doctor told you that your arteries were clogged 85%! Sure you would be under the knife sooner than you could tell your wife.

The individual internet providers know who is hogging up the bandwidth. For example, for internet browsing and e-mail you would use very little bandwidth, on-line gaming like Warcraft would register a little higher, but non-stop, 24-7 full-tilt torrent transfers would be very noticeable. So let's say your bandwidth was measured like electricity usage, the more you use the more it costs.

Figuring out who is hogging the bandwidth would not be a lot different than how police track down home grow-operations. Utilities report domestic locations that greatly exceed normal hydro usage. Unless someone is running a welder 24-7 in their garage, why would they need so much energy?

A similar detection method could be used to determine who are the bandwidth hogs and start charging them more. This would be a roundabout way of making peer-to-peers more expensive and lower their use.

Some cable and phone company services have slowly been introducing bandwidth caps and packages already, offering faster speeds and more bandwidth for higher fees.

Going after individual copyright offenders has been a failure for the movie industry and the music industry. They need to take a page from the past. Look at the royalty agreement radio stations pay for airing music and hit ISP's with some sort of charge. It is food for thought.

Check out the consensus coming out of seminars held during Canadian Music Week in Toronto Star entertainment columnist Greg Quill's latest column.