Symposium: Collective Management of Copyright: Solution or Sacrifice? Peer-to-Peer File Sharing and Copyright: What Could Be the Role of Collective Management?

P2P controversy is a story of the copyright industries’ increasingly brazen— some say desperate—attempts to shut down P2P file-swapping networks, disable P2P technology and shift the costs of control onto third parties, including telecommunications companies, consumer electronics manufacturers, corporate employers, universities, new media entrepreneurs and the taxpayers. 1 Although the extent and the forms of these schemes to authorize the transfer of copyrighted works through P2P networks vary greatly, they all share one similarity: the sums collected in counterpart to the authorization will be managed and distributed to the authors by collective management societies. Entrusting collective societies with this new role is logical because they have the institutional competence to issue blanket licensing and collect lump sums generated from the mass use of works, a task for which individual exercise of copyright is ill-suited. 2