Bring on the Fees!

iconian writes "Hillary Rosen of RIAA wants to impose a type of fee to ISPs which in turn will be passed to all their customers indiscriminately to recoup supposed damages done by file-sharing. The RIAA considers downloading music illegally over the Internet to be the moral equivalence of stealing. I wonder then what is the moral equivalence of the RIAA taking realized cash from people who do not download music?" [via /.]

Where do I subscribe? I personally have not downloaded music from the internet, because as an Intellectual Property (plaintiff's) lawyer it seems hypocritical to me to publicly sue people for infringement, but then to privately "infringe" the rights of other. However, if Rosen and the RIAA are going to (indirectly) charge me a fee to access sites such as Kazaa, then have they not just set the rate and have I not in fact just paid for a subscription to download all the music from these sites LEGALLY?

This truly sounds like a great idea just so long as the fee is reasonable. Another question I have, though, is what happens when the files I download are corrupted or one contains a virus that destroys my computer, am I in privity of contract with the RIAA and able to sue them for breach of contract?

Update: Someone's listening to the click-clack typing of the slashdotters... Anonymous Industry Official: "It's horrible. Anything we can do that's effective will seriously annoy our customers. I think we might need to stop fighting fire with fire and figure out something new to do, or we will end up with lots of ex-customers who swap files just out of spite." [via Wired]