Simon Waldman, director of digital strategy and development at the Guardian Media Group, makes an interesting case for a global collective rights system for content. He argues that the debate between the aggregators and the content owners is stuck in a stand-off and that what is needed is a system more like the rights systems employed by the music and video industries. He said at Beyond The Printed Word conference that Google’s negotiations with content owners after it acquired YouTube showed that there was growing acceptance that aggregators would have to pay for content. He also warned that the current view that advertising would be the business model of choice was misguided.