I’m tired of being penalized for other people’s lack of understanding. The MP3s I’ve ripped from my CD collection alone come to 104GB. Add the music DVDs that I’ve bought and ripped to XVID format, and my (now-dead) 160GB Archos couldn’t even handle it. I haven’t even ripped the hundreds of hours of TV shows I’ve bought in DVD sets, let alone my late partner’s extensive movie DVD collection. A true universal jukebox for my collection would need to be in the terabyte range. That’s just the stuff from physical media; add the stuff I’ve legally obtained from the Internet and the ”

And yes, I have spent a fortune on it. At the start of my career, music was where the single largest chunk of my disposable income went. 15 years ago I used my collection as collateral when getting a loan. The fact that most people don’t care about music enough to invest in it as I have doesn’t mean that everyone who does have a huge collection amassed it through nefarious means. For someone who claims to be part of a “fans and artists united” type of setup, not knowing anyone who loves music as much as I do (and many of my friends have collections that dwarf mine) is really a bit sad.

So this leave the door open to indies and independent artists to make it without having these parasites in the middle sucking their blood.

The entertainment business must and will adapt to the computer technology. Frankly without these 7 corporations of parasites in the middle of our live these new business models would be already operational and kicking.

It is time to put these parasites out of business right now even if we have to shot all of them one by one!

They represent a clear and present danger to our societies and our freedom.

@RW; I just paid $2 for a $370 purchase for a netbook, and the last LCD monitor I bought ($400) came with a $10 environmental tax. I’m a student, and I didn’t find it particularly prohibitive in either case, though I can appreciate how any markup can be for even more fixed budgets than my own. The majority of the Canadian consumer population isn’t in such a poor situation that an extra few dollars is prohibitive to their buying habits.

@EMP
I’m not trying to say that ‘open source doesn’t exist’ (you’ll not that everything I write is under CC license, actually) but that when I see a 160GB iPod I’m rarely confronted with a situation where they have 160GB of open source/CC music and video. To those few that do, well, I pay for local schools and don’t have children. I don’t find paying that particular tax prohibitive, vicious, or unfair but as me subsidizing something that is a known good (education on the one hand, artists and the vibrancy of culture on the other). Not all can or will be happy with any solution; this piece was written with the driving question, ‘how can artists receive some partial value when what they produce is downloaded?’ and tried to offer a solution. No solution will ever satisfy anyone, given that it is necessarily a strategic decision of how to engage with this issue, as is true of any and all political/economic decisions. Some compromise position needs to be found, and as is the case of any and all compromises not everyone (anyone?) is every totally happy with a compromise.

The article gives “open source” a nod, but fails to recognise that because of open source, free software, and initiatives like the creative commons, that there is growing body of legitimate content to be downloaded for which a fee is not required.

That means (to me anyway) that either the proposed levvies need to be scrapped and another method found (so as not to penalise those who may be legitimately downloading free content and are therefore being unjustly charged) or at the very least funding from these levvies distributed to some of the free content providers who (while they don’t _require_ payment for download) may rely on voluntary payment for content.

I actively avoid proprietary software, I don’t generally rip movies and DVDs, and yet over the last 20 years have amassed a CD collection (all paid for) of a couple of thousand discs. I am however employed in the tech industry and have a personal interest in things like OpenSolaris, BSd and Linux, and so download and burn many tens Gigs per year. I object to pating a levvy on the dics I use, the data I download, or the media player I fill with my already-paid-for music.

This whole discussion around a “tax” simply signals a greater problem, the failure of “old media” models. Artists should be remunerated for their work, but I think the record labels are just getting in the way as they struggle to remain relevant.

Given the kind of markup that rich politicians and businessmen seem to find acceptable, I’ll buy cheap little 4GiB MP3 players from China over eBay, store all my media on an untaxed 1.5TiB hard drive, and swap it out like EMS RAM on a DOS machine if I have to.

Anyway, the idea of a levy or tax is a failure of imagination. Because you’ve bought the line that the value of art lies in its copies (instead of the art), when the market for copies ends you conclude that art has no market value and must therefore be charged for (under threat). There is obviously a fundamental flaw in this. The art is not the copy. You pay the artist for their art. You pay your neighbour for a copy (or they give you a copy for nothing). Copy=$0. Art=$1,000. Don’t confuse the two.

The traditional solution to apparently intractable local problems like charging for copies, is to think globally: “We’ll get our big brother the government to knock heads together and collect a levy through force”. Instead, why not at least think half-way, say at the audience level, i.e. identify the artist’s customer? Then, instead of a reluctant and angry planet charged a tax on threat of jail time, you’re dealing with a crowd of people who a priori want to pay the artist for their work. Why not come up with a way of charging that willing audience a levy for the artist’s work? In fact to them it won’t be a levy to be charged, but a share of the commission they WANT to pay the artist.

Then you are effectively enabling the audience to assume the role of the artist’s traditional customer, the publisher. The publisher traditionally pays the artist a pittance for their work and then the publisher attempts to extract extortionate amounts of value from the public for their enjoyment and use of it – with none of that revenue from extortion generally getting back to the artist except in rare cases.

So let the audience pay the artist, and then it’s up to the audience whether they pay them a pittance or a decent amount (probably the latter). Fortunately the audience has no need or inclination to extort monopoly rents from everyone else.

So, when you reduce the scope of taxes down from everyone to just the traders concerned (each artist and their audience interested in exchanging art for money, money for art), you end up with the free market exchange that should have been obvious in the first place. Why waste billions on a levy? There are certainly organisations who’d jump at the chance to have money wasted on them, but that doesn’t make a levy a good idea.

1) If the blank media levy is so small, have you any idea why the price of CDRs is approaching DOUBLE that of the similar, but more-capable DVDR?

It would appear that “per unit” means “per disc.
If that’s the case, I don’t call that a small tax.

2) It’s nice to say we can “just put limits” on these proposed levies when it’s being theorized, but we all know that’s not how it works in practice.

Who’s going to impose these limits?
Who’s going to enforce them?
Who’s going to prevent all the other interested parties from demanding their cut and inflating the whole thing to the point of bursting?

We all know the answer to any of those is not “the Government”.

How do you ignore the 800-pound gorilla in the room?
This thing has “Pandora’s Box Syndrome” written all over it.

3) You’ve already acknowledged that “some” of the money would end up in the hands of the labels (mostly due to owning the majority of copyrights).

Why give them more, then?
Why go through the costly administrative headache of implementing such a scheme, if we know it’s only going to benefit the labels??

From that perspective, this could be seen as nothing more than an elaborate (and perpetual) “bailout” for a failing business model.

4) You’re obviously not in favour of a provider-based levy (”Internet tax”?), or the prospect of having ISPs do the tracking necessary in this scheme. (Neither am I!)

We obviously need to be fearful of any plan that would give anyone else that kind of power, all in the name of appeasing copyrights. I can’t even imagine who’d be a suitable “administrator” in that respect – certainly not the labels or any of their “authorized” music sites. Don’t think for one moment the labels wouldn’t kick and scream until they got that arrangement!