Choruss? Or the Canadian model?
Warner`s Choruss school licensing scheme is being touted by its main engineer, Jim Griffin (left) as, at the least, a partial answer to the bitter and brutal anti-P2P, anti-music-lover, anti-file sharing actions launched by Vivendi Universal (France), Sony (Japan), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music, American, but run by Canadian Edgar Bronfman jr (right), against their own customers,” said p2pnet last week.
But, we said:
* Until the members of the Big 4 Music Gang admit their approach to the online filesharing phenomenon has been wrong from the beginning;
* Until they apologise to the thousands of people around the world whose lives they`ve made thoroughly miserable with their bizarre sue `em all marketing campaign; and,
* Until they drop their specious lawsuits against people such as Jammie Thomas-Rasset â-
â- nothing they say or do will be worth a damn.
Under Choruss, students wouls pay Warner $5 a month for unlimited music downloads, and universities and their staffs would do all the work acting, to all intents and purposes, as unpaid music industry middlemen.
But, as p2pnet has asked many times before, where is it written that American (or any other schools of any kind anywhere) should act in any capacity on the corporate music industry?
Surely universities, colleges, and so on, exist to educate students, not act as hard-sell marketing and copyright enforcement divisions?
But such is the power of corporate persuasion it is now taken as granted that it’s acceptable for Vivendi Universal (France), Sony (Japan), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music (US) to seriously interfere with students’ studies in the name of the bottom line.
With Jim Griffin doing the talking, Choruss owner Warner Music is going flat out to enlist the support of music industry heavies, claiming, “Tens of thousands of students have signed up to pay for a legal P2P music program in US universities, set to start later this year in experimental form,” as The Register summed it up.
If the scheme ever makes it, the Big 4 will have what their efforts to sue students into becoming corporate consumers has failed to do: they’ll have a captive audience.
But, “I think I speak for the entire world (with the exception of the Music and other content industry executives) when I say, surely a government tax on computers, phones and communication traffic delivered on the basis of the type of file downloaded is the ultimate answer,” says Tom Koltai (right), continuing »»»
This would preferable to a flat levy scheme wherein individuals not downloading are penalized for those who are.
We have the tools today to determine what is consumed by whom.
The question remains whether that can be done without infringing privacy and I’m afraid the answer is a big fat No.
However, the benefit is that content will then become ubiquitous.
And there-in lies the problem.
I can see the Canadian flag flying (they have a recordable media tax in Canada) but I don’t see the industry appreciating the model.
In Canada, the government has elected to ignore the industry in-fighting. Their distribution model is simple ..
- 66% to eligible authors and publishers
- 18.90% to eligible performers
- 15.10% to eligible record companies.
And therein lies the rub. The Canadian government has set a value of only 15.10% on the non-performing and non-publishing Music Industry’s input.
But they’re also ensuring eligible authors and publishers receive a whopping 66% for generating new content.
As the Big four of the music industry are also it’s publishers, I don’t really see a problem.
In the beginning we had TV and Radio licences.
Tomorrow we’ll follow the Canadian model and have a tax on the media.
And think of the savings the industry can make.
They can immediately sack all those hangers on at the RIAA and their associated lapdogs! — although what Obama will do with a Justice Department full of RIAA ex-heavyweights is anybody’s guess. After all, their only claim to fame is their ability to terrorise 13-year-old kids and their solo parent mothers.
But at last the circle of life will be complete, taxes on your earnings, taxes on your entertainment and when you die, death taxes (and possibly in the future hazardous material waste disposal taxes on your old CD collections).
The government should actually like this model.
It’s sensible, stops the problems with the upstart political movements, clears our courts for real crimes (murder, rape and speeding) and allows the world to get on with living free of governmental control.
And why haven’t they done it?
Because no-one has done the numbers on how much a tax on media is worth to the industry on a global scale.
So we might have to see what we can do about that omission.
Tom Koltai – p2pnet
[Koltai is an economist in Sydney Australia. He's says he's been online for 26 years, has run several ISPs and, "lobbied governments in four countries to prevent Internet restrictive usage legislation from being enacted". He says he's a strong believer in P2P, "as being a technological requirement to fully exploit the convergence of telephony with computers and remove the last barriers to human communication and interaction".]
[Also, Tom, you might see what you can do about arriving at an estimate of just how much of a directly negative effect the sue 'em all campaign has had on sales numbers. I don't think anyone has attempted that. Cheers! JN]
June, 2009
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