Ed Felten talks about compulsory licensing of music on Freedom to Tinker (A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come?). The idea of compulsory licensing is that a tax would be charged on things like Internet connections, recordable media (CD-Rs, etc.), hard drives and the like. This tax would then be distributed to the record companies, artists and songwriters. In return, P2P networks would be legal. He points out some of the bad aspects of the policy:
There are plenty of reasons to dislike this proposal. It's a non-market approach, based on a tax-and-redistribute model. It makes the price of music a political issue, rather than something to be worked out consensually between buyers and sellers. And a politically viable version of it would necessarily lock in much of the economic inefficiency in today's music business.
But he ultimately suspects "that it's the only way out of the mess we're in."
Perhaps he is right. But if so, why should the policy be restricted to music? If you check any P2P client that permits you to watch what people are searching for, you will find that, after music, pornography is the most widely fileshared product.
Thus, I propose that if compulsory licensing for music is adopted, we should adopt compulsory licensing for pornography. A tax should be imposed and distributed to those who make pornography on the same basis that music is so supported. The tax might be a little smaller (though likely not much). The logic seems the same to me.