Is the future united?

Conversation with bepress' Jean-Gabriel Bankier the other day provoked an interesting discussion here about how best to determine what should count as a download.   

But Jean-Gabriel had a great idea about a related subject, which I think warrants further conversation: namely, why not have the publishers (SSRN, bepress, and even Westlaw and Lexis) aggregate the various "numbers" so that if there is consensus eventually about what counts as a download, then we can get a unified vision of how many downloads a piece has received.  I doubt it would be too difficult to share this information--and it would be the equivalent of putting a sitemeter on a law review article, a point I believe was raised recently at the HLS bloggership conference (but I confess I can't remember whose idea it was--maybe Larry or Orin's).  I recognize that this topic may be of interest to increasingly fewer and fewer people, but I thought for those seven who might be interested--and I"m not sure I count myself as one of them anymore--it would be worth some discussion about the costs and benefits of having a unified download metric, and how we might get there if it's desirable.