[pp.int.general] The Songwriters Association of Canada endorsesfilesharing legalization

[Valentin Villenave]

2008/1/5, Rick Falkvinge (Piratpartiet) <rick at piratpartiet.se>:

> First, the proposal fails to answer the most basic question:
>
> WHO is going to be compensated FOR WHAT and WHY?

Yeah, this is what I told the other guys in France :)

> Second, if they should get this benefit of taxing the public, don't expect
> moviemakers, porno filmers, mp3 books etc. to stand far behind in line. They
> have assumed that everybody could pay $5 a month, but are not seeing the
> bigger picture of more people wanting a slice of that pie, should it prove
> to exist.
>
> I see a bunch of people saying "We are starting to understand that the world
> has changed. But we still like money. Therefore, in order to make sure we
> get money, we would like the ability to tax the public."

LOL!

this is quite a good argument here. Here in France, we're dicussins a
*lot* about what's called here the "global license", which is
basically what the canadian guys are asking for: a small fee paid by
every Internet user who wants to download stuff, and then would be
used to compensate alleged money losses for authors.

What makes me quite skeptical about it is that in France, we already
have many taxes on writable CDs, hard drives, USB drives, and even
mobile phones and digital cameras... *just* (theoretically) to provide
the artists with some compensations in case we'd want to use these
CDs, HDs etc, to copy some music or videos (which is anyway strictly
forbidden, but hey, who cares about consistence?).

The facts are that no artist has ever seen this money redistributed.
It's just another tax income that is used by the government to do...
whatever they do with it (I have nothing wrong with paying fair taxes
for a better society, but I just hate to see my money being offered as
Christmas gifts for major companies and Culture industry).

So, I find that these "songwriters" are either naive or dishonnest.
None of these is good per se, but still, it's great to see that some
people are finally understanding they can't stop knowledge and culture
from being freely shared among citizens!

Regards,
Valentin