U.K. to Become the Second Country to Launch Legal P2P Service

We previously announced you that legal broadband subscription services that would allow file sharing are likely to emerge on the market by the end of the year. Now the prospects seem within reach.

U.K. will see its first licensed peer-to-peer music file-sharing service by early next year, as a market effect of government demands and the threat of legislation that would compel Internet service providers and the music industry to collaborate.

There are some issues still to be clarified though: for instance, how will the royalties be distributed, and what will be the procedure regarding music that has never been given license for digital distribution (and thus the question rises – will the music service providers disregard it, or try to close a deal with the owners?)

This project would establish the U.K. as the second country (after South Korea), where music industry have decided to license songs to a subscription-based file-sharing service that would operate based on consumers' fees per month for high-speed Internet.In what concerns price, the ISPs will be the ones to set it.

What would distinguish the next generation of broadband-backed subscription schemes (at this time being analyzed), and the one currently in use is that the first are designed to allow and support exchanges of music between subscribers. Subscription services like eMusic and Napster although make available music for download they don’t let users share it. Others include different strategies – you can share playlists using Omnifone's licensed mobile service Music Station for example – (the receiving device being populated with tracks centrally over the network); QTrax has become a legal P2P service using ad-supported milieu instead of the subscription method.