6) In your lifetime, has there ever been a tax introduced anywhere that was not expanded, increased, or turned into a complete piece of extortion in some way or another?

Rather than counter-critique you again, I’ll just let you ask yourself…

1) Who’s going to collect the tax?
(You do understand that the artists will not be able to collect directly, right?)

2) Once the collector is established, how many groups do you think will come forward demanding THEIR cut?

3) Once the collector is established, how many ways do you think it will it have to be divided?

4) How will everyone’s cut be determined?
(Not every artist owns the rights, not every song is a hit, etc. And how much personal tracking are you willing to tolerate before you think it will defeat everyone’s security/privacy, or defeat the Internet experience itself? And WHO would you be comfortable with doing the necessary tracking?!? Lots of self-evident questions exist on this point alone.)

5) Do you think 5€ per month will amount to enough to pay off EVERY artist, label, performance fee collector, distributor… ad infinitum?
(Do you even realize how many such “rights holders” and other interested groups that would need to be addressed??)

Simply measure popularity of the art and pay the artists/creators accordingly.

5€ per month culture tax, if everyone pays that in average based on their income/fortune tax, that would be much more money than artists have ever had, it would finance much better art, much better creations.

There are many reliable ways to measure popularity of content on the Internet. Google Analytics for one, Razorback-style p2p analytics for another, Last.fm style scrobbler plugins installed a hundreds of thousands of consumers for another, also simply measure the amount of downloads in HTTP statistics if the Government could setup a digital library website hosting all the contents.

Actually no. New Zealand passed such a law and then has to scrap it because they realized that it is not enforceable.

This is assuming that the constitutional counsel does not strike down the law again and that the European court of justice does not say anything against it. This is unlikely considering the content.

The French are already on the edge of an insurrection and I don’t believe the French government will dare to try to enforce such a law. The law will not be scraped (because the French government never scrap laws) but will be dead. (The French code is full of such zombie laws. One such a law was the Dadvsi law who was never enforced. You remember?)

If they were going to try to enforce this law they would strike people randomly regardless of if they were downloading anything or not, just to pretend that it is working.

The French police and justice is already doing that arresting and condemning people without real proof just to try to show that the police and the justice is efficient while they are not. People are not duped though.

(Search the net using the key word: Ivan Colonna, Julien Coupat for two examples of these.)

It is a good time to be a criminal in French because if you are a little bit careful, it is very likely that someone else than you will bear the hat for your crime. The police will not dig very deep and will declare a guilty person within few weeks or few days. Also if you are a member of the “Elite” you will get a great deal of impunity. (Follow the stories about Sarkozy’s son for example)

On another hand if you are an alien and if you look Arabic, black or Asian you are in trouble!

I can also see that hackers will spoof government IP addresses, and if they are then exempted from the law that they passed, this will be made public.

And when it does, heads will roll (perhaps literally).

But along with this there will be a notable increase in the use of encryption and non-p2p methods of getting content like Usenet and file hosting services like Rapidshare.

I am french and I follow this website for a little time (2 or 3 months) and also I use some words from here for my website http://anarzone.com

I read a thing which make me be surprised (sorry for my bad english this is not my langage) in this post : this is not the french people which made this fucking law, but our stupid president and his band of thieves. The part of the people which were for this law were the part of the people who believe the TV news, and who have vote for Sarkozy. The bad part of the people.

I like your site keep it like this. I will sometimes put a commentary to say you I steal your words… (joke, when I “steal” some words, I always say before from who these are words, and after, I put a link toward the original article.

greetings.

Cynoque from anarzone, a french free website uncensored.

Thanks for pointing that out. I’d meant to add leaders (…) .

Fixed.

Cheers!

The whole sentence should probably read: “We predict that before very long, France will once again become the scene of a revolution. But this time stay tuned”.

Obviously this was sarcasm! And no intended insults to any Americans that realize France has nothing to do with French Fries.

/sarcasm

http://blogs.mysanantonio.com/weblogs/timewasters/guillotine.bmp

http://www.google.fr/search?q=trou+du+cul+du+web

If you think the endless list of interested parties looking for their “cut” would be happy with your 5€ per month, you haven’t thought it through.

All proposed schemes involving “file sharing levies”, “artist taxes”, “license fees”, or any of the thousand other synonymous terms can only fail, as there are simply too many “rights holders” and “royalties collectors” to satisfy. They’ve all pretty well stated that their terms under such a scenario would “need to be” far more expensive than reasonable.

It’s been a while. If you do anything on this, please let me know,

Cheers!

Vive la France, vive la liberte!