Wired reports that several companies in the recording industry are in talks with universities and colleges to add a flat fee into tuition that would give students legal access to all music on the Internet. All students at a university would pay a small fee—around $5 a month under the plan, which is still in the early stages, and in return would then be able to download music at the university without fear of legal retribution from the recording industry. Limewire or BitTorrent or whatever program or software they already use could be used to download music.
The nonprofit, Choruss,would collect and disburse the money to record labels and music copyright holders; three of the four major labels have already signed on to this "voluntary blanket licensing" experiment.
The universities that have been approached so far are Columbia, Cornell, MIT, Penn State, Stanford, UC-Berkeley, University of Chicago, University of Colorado, University of Michigan, University of Washington, and University of Virginia.
