On April 27 the newly formed Intellectual Property Rights organisation honoured Bulgaria's BTK for its intellectual property policy, which, according to a self-congratulatory media statement, had led to "the formation of the largest portal for the legal online downloading of music in Bulgaria".

Stanislava Armoutlieva, executive chair of the board of the Bulgarian Association of Music Producers (BAMP), was quoted as saying that "we reward selected businesses in Bulgaria, which respect the rule of law, a European spirit in relation to intellectual property rights and their importance to society, and assert the protection of these rights with good practice and a clear corporate policy."

The service in question is BTK 's 4fun.bg,  the first large-scale legal pay-per-download portal in Bulgaria.

In itself, the portal offers nothing new. Apple and others have long shown that the business model of pay-per-download is viable, especially when combined with the sales of MP3 players and software. The problem is that BTK is not in the business of selling MP3 players or software for mobile devices.

So instead, it has picked a business model that proved highly successful for many LAN-internet providers in Bulgaria in the past decade; tying access to music (or software or films) to internet access.

About a decade ago, the norm in Bulgaria was dial-up internet access, mostly using pre-paid cards that were sold at newspaper stands. At that point, Bulgaria had several so-called free-zones; parts of the national network that were invisible outside the country and from where just about anything could be downloaded. Access to these free-zones was, more often than not, limited to one or several LAN broadband internet providers and used openly to push the sales of broadband internet access.

It was no surprise that in some cases the owners of the network provider and the free-zone were alleged to be one and the same person or group of persons.

BTK has liberally copied this business model by making its "legal download portal" 4fun.bg only accessible to its ADSL clients.

With all international legal download portals telling Bulgarians they are "unavailable in your country," BTK's offer is the only alternative. But can it compete with the treasure troves of p2p networks? Especially if you consider that the vast majority of downloads made available on p2p networks are already legal and free.

The hard nut to crack for Big Media still seems to be that in the digital world artificial scarcity does not increase profit margins but instead leads to market loss.

It is high time intellectual property associations, new and old, understand the urgency of intellectual property rights' reform that would lead to real increased income for artists, shorter, not longer, copyright terms and wider and greater ease of availability of copyrighted material.