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

[Nicolas Sahlqvist]

I talked to a guy from Belgium yesterday and I did not know that many
ISP's there charge per GB so as you can imagine, having a similar
license tax solution would indeed be counter productive to development
of the culture etc. Having a flat fee would not be able to identify
all creators so it would be unfair at best with a big intrusion of
privacy concern so such a solution is hitting 2 of 3 ground principles
(free culture, the right to privacy) that created the PirateParty in
the first place why I agree with your conclusion "reduction ad
absurdum".

I did not know they made a logical argument about the CD/DVD tax in
Sweden, but they made it illegal to download after they implemented
the CD/DVD tax and the Dutch argument was never heard from the
government. I would love to see a debate about this in Sweden. I
however think the media distribution industry will through lobbying
make it illegal to download in NL too and/or implement the IPRED law
unless there are strong protests in NL and EU about this.


- Nicolas


On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 1:34 PM, Reinier Bakels <r.bakels at planet.nl> wrote:
> 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
> ____________________________________________________
> Pirate Parties International - General Talk
> pp.international.general at lists.pirateweb.net
> http://lists.pirateweb.net/mailman/listinfo/pp.international.general
>