[pp.int.general] cultural flatrate: PP position?

[Reinier Bakels]

Thanks for your interesting comments again! Yes, I am aware of the 
similarities with blank media levies. I actually did some research into the 
levies issue, and found that:
1) any tariff is arbitrary, whether it is a percentage of the sales price 
(which means that artists would get less money as technology advances), or a 
fee per bit (which would render high-resolution versions unreasonably 
expensive, and would favour ASCII text files over PDFs, etc.). Under the 
latter approach, the levy percentage of the sales price would rapidly 
increase to 99%, inevitably creating a black market = a major enforcement 
problem. In the cassette player era, a cassette == 60 or 90 minutes, but 
obviously there is no longer such fixed relationship.
2) distribution schemes: if the purpose of copyright is to foster culture 
rather than to add to the bottom line of "author businesses", numbers are 
irrelevant, and a policy based distribution scheme must be devised, which is 
not a trivial thing (unlike collection societies may argue): "no taxation 
without representation", as a constitutional principle
3) enormous amounts of copyrighted material are distributed under implicit 
royalty-free licences (like this email itself!, and most HTML files on the 
web).

> The really odd thing with all these taxes does not mean that you can
> freely copy music CDs or DVDs - it’s still considered piracy why I do
> not think the media industry will lay down their arms just because

Frankly, at least in NL it is the opposite: the law allows private copying 
and instituted the levy system to compensate that. I recall a debate in the 
parliament when a member questioned the appropriateness of a levy scheme 
because it would start from the premise of (massive) copyright violation, 
but then the minister corrected that this perception is wrong, because 
private copies are allowed. Wether the levy income is considered sufficient 
to compensate P2P sharing (under the assumption - for the sake of argument - 
that compensation is appropriate!) is something else.

I like an approach that endorses the levy (or flat fee) approach, but 
insists on a fully consistent application. Which includes a levy on blank 
paper (instead of the levy on copying machines, which is actually very 
impopular, in particular for small businesses), and also compensates for 
user provided content, INCLUDING all contributions to mailing lists and 
other e-mail. I applied consistently, I assume that mobile telephone owners 
with a camera do'nt have to pay a levy but get money back, for all the 
marvelous pictures the upload to the web. Any proposal to differentiate 
would run counter to basic principles of copyright. No discrimination!

While British copyright law requires a "fixation", most continental 
copyright regulations even recognise copyright for speech(es). Similar to 
written text depending on paper, speach depends on air, so I suggest there 
should also be a levy on air. For practical purposes, the content (in m3) of 
houses may serve as a measure (assuming that most of it is air) - but that 
still does not solve the problem of speeches in the open air. In NL, a 
recent decision of the supreme court revealed that even simple conversations 
can be subject to copyright (but admittedly that was a special case: a 
newspaper wanted to publish the recordings of police interviews of a person 
about his contacts with criminals, who was murdered not much later - which 
was not appreciated by the relatives).

But the conclusion of my proposed "reduction ad absurdum" thought experiment 
reveals the source of the problem: the record companies!

reinier