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In Reply to: Re: Good Question posted by Eric LeRouge on May 25, 2004 at 06:55:33:
Eric,I don't think you can compare paying taxes for education or for healthcare with a direct, law sanctioned financing of corporations (do you think that all of the money will be pocketed by the "artists"?).
Also, notice that the levy on blank CD-R, DVD-R, tapes is a law here in Italy. But, by paying your CD-Rs ten cents more or so you aren't granted a permission to copy records. What gives? Money to the syndicate - the only one - protecting the artists' copyright, which redistributes it to their affiliates proportionally to their sales. So the young artist trying to make something significant gets maybe some cent. And the 12 years old can still be thrown in jail.
Follow Ups:
Igor,I don't know much about the CD-R tax, but obviously this is still being implemented.
As for health and education: We are not talking about the same orders of magnitude, obviously: health care and education represent 20% of the state budget each, so approx. 40% of taxes, not counting direct contribution for health insurance off the salary (> 20%). So a $5 contribution every month sounds pretty harmless to me.
Re: allocation of the revenues. As an example, I know a % of every cinema ticket sold goes to a fund to finance new films, and this helps smaller independent film makers who could never find producers for their first film. That system works very well, and has helped protect a local movie industry here in France, with some quality production as well.
The trick would be to duplicate this model: allocate a % of the total funds to new labels and new artists, and also make sure that independent music is represented in the allocation of revenues.My point is that I don't think I can prevent my daughter from downloading files from the Internet, even if I try to explain that MP3 quality is not good. She'll still do it, because all her friends do it. So if I pay $5 per month and feel that things are not illegal, I will feel better.
As for revenues going to the music companies, I think that's fair. When I buy a CD in retail, less than 20% of the price I pay goes to the artist, so....
Cheers
That's bad news.
But it will still be illegal... Copyright laws will still be broken, even though you pay $5 a month.And it's the principal of the thing. Why should law abiding people be forced to pay yet again for the criminals?
We're already doing that in so many other aspects of life, but that's certainly not a reason for just keep adding on. That's not a way to solve crime.See it this way... For $5 I can almost get a CD from CDWow. This means that each month I shall sacrifice one legal purchase, because some people don't want to do like me and pay for their music. How is that fair?
Next time you buy a car, do you want to pay a little extra, so that your local car thief can get a copy of your key and a GPS tracker, so he doesn't have to break the windows of your car, which he found using the GPS tracker, when he breaks in to rip your car stereo?
I'm already in a way being incriminated by the "copy protection" schemes on CD's. I'm not gonna get even more incriminated by paying money so thieves can continue breaking the law.
OK Viper,You have good points, and I am not defending pirates who copy music for a living.
Just look at it from a practical point of view. You and I may be gone in a little while, but two things are sure to stay: P2P file transfer and teenagers.
There's no way peer-to-peer file swapping is going to disappear, this technology is here for good, and it will start again and again, no matter what the publishers try to do. Just like you could not prevent people from making photocopies with Xerox machines, you cannot prevent people to use the Internet to do file transfer.
Another thing that you will not change is teenagers. I think the music problem is more with casual downloading done by kids, which eventually amounts to large sums of money. Sure you can try to enforce the law, and you can try to prevent kids from drinking at a party or smoking a joint, but most likely you won't be able to stop them from doing it. So what should you do? Pretend it doesn't exist or just wait for the authorities (record companies) to enforce the law in a brutal manner?
Heck, I'd rather pay something and not have some Orwellian system prosecute my kids for some stupid music downloads. This is just music we're talking about.
Accepting some kind of monthly fee to compensate file transfer may not be the best solution, but it's a start in the right direction.
Best
Eric
Of course it's here to stay, sadly.
A method of solving this would probably instead provide the downloaders with a cheap, legal alternative, for them to get the music. There would probably be a lot going this route, so they wouldn't be breaking the law. The music business knows this too and are working on solutions for legal downloading of music.
There's still gonna be people who will break the law and continue what they're doing now.If you could provide a fully legal alternative for your kid, where she could download music for a small fee, wouldn't that be better?
My points probably mainly comes from me being "fed up" with all this. The useless copy protections that doesn't work, but I'm paying for. Only thing they do is make my life harder and a criminal if I want to copy the CD to my MD.
And then all the teenagers that think *I'm* stupid, because I buy all my music. It's scary when there's people out there with that kind of morale.
Viper,Well, that's exactly what they are proposing: a way to make P2P music transfers "legal", for a flat fee. Somewhere around $5 a month sounds OK to me, but not much more.
I understand your frustration, but believe me, you are paying much higher amounts for other useless and illegal things out of your taxes, insurances, etc (I know that's my case anyway :)
As soon as a system that makes economic sense will be in place, I see no real reason for all the copy protection schemes.
There's a greater danger IMO in the digital copyright laws being drafted throughout Europe, those will basically make any recording of your LPs, cassettes, movies, CDs, etc, illegal, even for your own private use. The whole thing is pretty stupid, and really scary if you think that some lawyers, lobbyists and clueless politicians are able to push such totalitarian ideas all the way to parliament.
But that's another story :)
"As soon as a system that makes economic sense will be in place, I see no real reason for all the copy protection schemes."But the corporate welfare recipients will.
Yeah, but the difference is that everybody has to pay, instead of those using it - and there's still no control, as you can download as much as you want, without any problems... Then suddenly $5 is too small an amount.I know that we're paying for such things already, I wrote that earlier ;) But as I wrote then, it is not a reason to just keep adding on that pile.
We agree on all the laws. They're insanely stupid. Like now, you can make a digital copy, for yourself, of your bought CD, which you couldn't do before (at least not here in Denmark), but if it has any copy protection schemes, you are not allowed to break them, to make yourself a copy. How does that make sense? It's just a big mess and there's nobody really taking the time to actually understand the situation.
But I still believe that if cheap alternatives become available from the record companies for people to download music, much of the p2p trafic will stop and they can get an income that way. From what I understand, there's a lot of people willing to pay for downloads, as long as the price is reasonable. But we'll see when this trend actually becomes more available to users than it is today. A lot of the record companies are taking actions to come out with something that provides an alternative to buying the music on CD or whatever.
No wonder you're fed up with taxes.. I think you need two jobs there: one to pay the taxes, and the other to pay the rentJust kidding.. Whereabout in DK are you based? There are several Danish inmates who come to this board regularly
I read there was a Danish artist published on DVD-Audio (and also one on SACD) recently, did you check it out?
Best
Hehe, yeah... We pay about 50% in taxes and when we want to buy a car, we have to pay 180% more than it costs... And then insurance... Oh, it's great ;)Yeah, I know about some of the danish inmates too - I know of at least 2 others. I'm on Sealand.
I haven't had a chance to check out the SACD yet. Hopefully I'll get around to it pretty soon, should be interesting to see how it turned out.
50% is about what my wife and I pay here in the US. Between federal & state taxes which come out of our paychecks and local real estate tax on our house, the total take was just under 50% of our income last year and just over 50% the year before that. And we're upper middle class at best, carrying a lot of debt and not remotely wealthy. Admittedly, most material goods are cheap here, and sales & fuel taxes are low, but otherwise you're not doing as bad as you think.
I know we have it pretty good, all around. We have a good social system that takes care of everyone and got a lot of other benefits from the taxes we pay.
The main thing that gets to me is all the taxes we have to pay on cars. At least it's getting more focus these days, so changes could happen on that account. It would be nice to be able to afford some of the cars I otherwise would be able to buy, if I were living in Sweden, Germany or the UK.
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