<p>Hi all,</p>
<p>Personally, I am not favorable to the introduction of a flat-rate tax, in fact, I am against most indirect taxes. </p>
<p>The spanish law allows people to share any cultural good without being a crime, whilst there's no trading on it. In short, p2p is not illegal.</p>
<p>On the other hand, we have SGAE&co sucking our blood with foolish royalties (even hairdressers pay them!) but it has been demonstrated that less than 5% of the artists afiliated to this non-state monopoly receive some cash from SGAE, and SGAE expends (at least, 'cause their accounting isn't public) 50% of their earnings in renting offices and paying spots, making it clear that:</p>
<p> 1.- Introducing a flat-rate tax would only add some taxes to people under the spanish law, so, we will only loose money.</p>
<p> 2.- Current remuneration schema doesn't help at all to most authors and we do still have cultural goods, so, authors survive without this purposed compensatory model.</p>
<p> 3.- Flat-rate taxes are against equal opportunity, as extremely poor people might be excluded, or the state might give them "cultural welfare checks", which is only a way to raise taxes to middle classes.</p>
<p> 4.- If an industry is obsolete it has 2 options: change or extinguish. I am not going to give welfare checks to slave traders, IMHO they must simply extinguish.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The culture existed before trade, so culture is not a good, it's a gift.</p>
<p>We live in a planet where 97% of the money exists only in electronic records, and 95% of all the money belongs to less than 100.000 persons and7 Billion survive with the remaining 5% of the cash, introducing more taxes to those whom don't own the planet is not only unfair but also dumb.</p>
<p>Don't ask the pyramid builders to pay more taxes to listen some music, ask the pharaoh to give away part of its gold so all we can have some music!</p>
<p>And, btw, I am not a commie :P I just focus on what it's crazy, if you want to raise cash to support culture, make taxes fair and then, use the collected money in the best way you can.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Introducing uniform solutions into unbalanced systems just keeps the system unbalanced. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Warm wishes,</p>
<p>Kenneth</p>
<p> </p>
<p>On Mon, 1 Nov 2010 11:52:17 -0200, Rodrigo Pereira <rodrigo2kpereira@gmail.com> wrote:</p>
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<div class="gmail_quote">2010/11/1 Richard Stallman <span><<a href="mailto:rms@gnu.org">rms@gnu.org</a>></span><br />
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid #cccccc; margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="im"> Perhaps, if flat rate replace copyright monopoly, probably is more useful<br /> use the money to support cultural programs in general than copyright<br /> industry. If copyright run together this new tax, I don't know a reason to<br /> support this tax.<br /><br /></div>
The idea is that one new law would legalize file sharing (including on<br /> the Internet) and establish this new tax.<br />
<div class="im"><br /> So, I think is priority in Brazil, first,<br /> the decriminalization of copyright infringement, not impose a new tax to<br /> people.<br /><br /></div>
The idea is that the new tax makes possible the decriminalization (and<br /> legalization) of sharing copies. Thus, sharing would no longer be<br /> infringement.<br />
<div></div>
</blockquote>
</div>
So, need to remove<span style="font-size: x-small;"> Berne Convention</span>: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention_for_the_Protection_of_Literary_and_Artistic_Works">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention_for_the_Protection_of_Literary_and_Artistic_Works</a><br /><br />I had a hope in CUBA, unfortunately they signed...<br /><br />I have a belief that filesharing legalized do not hurts culture, in contrary, so isn't necessary a new tax to balance the "lack of culture development". For example, many speeches of industry is that filesharing is killing culture or piracy is killing music or home cooking is killing restaurant industry... This is not true. <span><span>And I would no longer feed this </span></span><span><span>bankrupt </span></span><span><span>industry.</span></span></blockquote>
<p> </p>