This article was originally published in the International Herald Times:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/01/23/business/isle26.1-414052.php

[The island, a rainy outpost in the Irish Sea, is promoting an offbeat remedy for digital piracy, which the record companies blame for billions of dollars in lost sales. Instead of fighting file-sharing, the government wants to embrace it – and it is trying to enlist a skeptical music industry in support.

Under a proposal announced this month, the 80,000 people who live on the Isle of Man would be able to download unlimited amounts of music – perhaps even from notorious peer-to-peer pirate sites. To make this possible, broadband subscribers would have to pay a nominal fee of as little as £1, or $1.37, a month to their Internet service providers.

Ron Berry, director of inward investment for the Isle of Man, said the music industry needed radical approaches because of the “utter failure” of its current strategies. Global music sales have fallen nearly 25 percent since 2000. And despite a nearly decade-long anti-piracy campaign, the industry’s international trade group estimates that 95 percent of tracks distributed over the Internet are pirated, generating no revenue at all for the record companies.

“A lot of people in the business are concerned with how much money they are losing, but not with how much money they could make,” Berry said.]
More was said on this was made by Gerd Leonhard at Mediafuturists.com: http://www.mediafuturist.com/2009/01/is-musics-future-on-the-isle-of-man—international-herald-tribune.html