how-to block ads
|
|
Uniqs:
220 |
Share Topic
 |
 |
|
|
| This is a gross distortion of the facts. I'm not a fan of the music industry but I'm frustrated by how many people will cut off their noses to spite their faces.
This is not a piracy tax. It is a collective licensing system, something many people outside of the industry have been advocating for years.
Calling it a protection racket is nonsense. A protection racket threatens you(something illegal) and then demands money to stop doing that illegal threatening thing. I detest the industry and their policy of suing people, but suing people for copyright infringement is not illegal. Furthermore it is wrong to say this is paying them to not sue you. It is paying them to accept free and open peer to peer access of copyrighted material. People who say "why pay for what is free" are ignoring the fact that what is free is only free because people are ignoring the law, not because the companies who hold these copyrights are providing it for free.
Saying that it taxes those who don't download is stretching it. The only reason that many don't download now is because it is not legal behavior. If it became legal behavior many who don't now do it would begin to do it. There are very few people who don't access copyrighted music in one way or another and this would be a benefit to nearly everyone.
I'm begging people not to develop knee jerk reactions to this. Let's think intelligently about the details of this and not do something stupid. If we really have the chance to move to a world which unleashes limitless consumption of content, free of drm, using the applications and appliances of our choice without restriction, in exchange for $5 a month, that is one hell of a deal. | |
 gaforcesUnited We Stand, Divided We Fall
join:2002-04-07
Santa Cruz, CA | No thanks, I'll stick to my free radio »www.kpig.com and free online radio »www.pandora.com
I'm not paying extra so people can download the new Brittany album or some other crud that shouldn't have been on a label 
--
There is no greater sign of a general decay of virtue in a nation, than a want of zeal in its inhabitants for the good of their country. ~ Joseph Addison | |
| reply to asdfdfdfdfdf
To those who do not engage in piracy and are not customers of the music industry, this is a tax. I'm being forced to license something I don't want. It's called a tying contract, and it's illegal. | |
| "I'm being forced to license something I don't want"
It isn't at all clear that you won't be able to opt out. We don't begin to know all the details of this particular proposal yet, but so far the claims are that there will be opt-out at the isp level(though not at the individual level so you would have to choose your isp based on their support of this approach).
"To those who do not engage in piracy and are not customers of the music industry"
This isn't about whether you engage in piracy. If this happens, the way that jim griffin has been advocating, then you could trade and download material to your hearts content and you wouldn't be a pirate. Are you telling me that if you could find and trade whatever musical material you wanted, whenever you wanted, that it wouldn't be worth $5 a month to you to do that? You would only be a pirate today because the industry has not licensed the material for such use. Once it is licensed you are not a pirate.
You say you are not a customer of the music industry. Are you really a person who never listens to music, radio(which functions under a collective licensing scheme itself), cds, records, itunes tracks or anything of the sort? If so, let's be honest, how many people do you think are like you and would really want to opt out of this.
If you say "but even one person paying when they aren't using is a violation of my principles" I can understand your feelings but applying such a principle would obliterate a huge amount of human activity where we don't pay for use. Societies have never worked like that, in the main because creating a world where people really only pay only for what they use and for the amount they use would create such massive intrusive overhead that the system would collapse. At the end of the day this makes nearly everyone's life easier at very low cost to any particular person, it provides consumers with freedom and flexibility while making sure that creators get paid. If you say the creators probably won't get the money anyway that is not a argument against collective licensing. We can all wish that the music business was structured differently but that is a decision to be made by the creators and the companies they hand their material over to, it isn't a decision to be made by the consumer. | |
|
