In a speech at MIDEM’s first International Manager Summit, U2's manager Paul McGuinness asserted that your Internet Service Provider should pay his band and their label part of their profits because the service ISPs provide allows people to illegally share music.

While this strategy to crack down on file sharing may be marginally better than the one employed by the RIAA (suing housewives, kids, grandmothers, and dead people), it still grossly misplaces fault and reassigns responsibility for the mess that is the recored music industry today.

Based on this speech, it would be hypocritical for Mr. McGuinness to not also champion the (equally absurd) idea that labels/artists should pay a surcharge to ISPs for the bandwidth used for each legal music download from iTunes, Amazon, whathaveyou.

I'm surprised to hear something this shortsighted blaring out of the U2 camp. Who do they think they are, Metallica?

Read McGuinness's (lengthy) MIDEM speech.