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It wasn't talking to the taxman about poetry but British alt rocker Billy Bragg came to Parliament Hill this morning to plead with regulators about free music.

Mr. Bragg, who played Ottawa Thursday night, joined NDP MP Charlie Angus Friday to press Ottawa to avoid criminalizing music downloading when it updates copyright protection law.

The British singer and the New Democrats are calling on Ottawa to let artists find a way to make music file swapping a legitimate part of promotion and sales.

Mr. Bragg and other artists want to see new ways to pay performers for music available online while protecting downloaders. He said record labels will often sell entire catalogues to websites without giving the artists a cut.

“We have a slogan that where money is made, artists must be paid. What’s implicit in that slogan is that we should go after those people who are making profit from giving our stuff away for free or selling it online,” he said.

“The other edge of that particular argument is that people who are sharing files ... really should not be within the reach of the copyright law.”

The federal government consulted Canadians and industry figures last fall about proposed changes to its sorely outdated copyright laws after facing overwhelming opposition to a bill tabled last year.

Bill C-61 would have made it illegal for any Canadian to circumvent digital copyright “locks” put on pieces of audio or video, rendering it impossible for people to share material with impunity.

One of the ideas offered by Mr. Angus would be to charge a levy on the purchase of any MP3 player, such as the government did when Canadians purchased blank CDs or cassettes. The idea then was to collect the money and then compensate artists for material that was used when people made their old “mixed tapes.”

With a report from The Canadian Press