[IP] Re: Music industry proposes a piracy surcharge on ISPs

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

________________________________________
From: Roger Bohn [Rbohn@ucsd.edu]
Sent: Friday, March 14, 2008 11:36 AM
To: David Farber
Cc: ip
Subject: Re: [IP] Music industry proposes a piracy surcharge on ISPs

If, I say, this comes to pass, what is to say that it won't have the
opposite of the desired effect where:
b) the notion of paying such a tax causes users to reason that if
they're paying for downloading, they may as well get their money's
worth?


That is exactly the point. Decriminalize downloading, treat it as a "tax," and get the music industry out of our computers.   More refined versions would sample the stream from different sources to measure music DL, and adjust the fees accordingly.  For example, universities would pay more; slow speed connections would pay less.  ISPs could decide how to divvy up their fees - it just becomes a cost of doing business, the way it is for radio stations today.

In exchange, everyone in the US gets "free music."   An analog is  the fees that the BBC charges every TV owner in the UK. From the Wired article:
The practice spread to the United States in 1914 and currently applies to radio airplay and webcasts in addition to live performances. In a 2004 white paper, the Electronic Frontier Foundation called for it to be applied to file sharing, but the Recording Industry Association of America immediately dismissed the proposal.

Opponents of RIAA should favor this concept. Let industry participants  (artists, labels, etc) fight over how to divide the spoils, and let them go back to their place as a very minor tail which has been trying to wag a very large dog (entire Computers & Info Tech sector).  The common objection will be "it's not fair," but it's no more unfair than the 911 tax on cellular, or .

Unfortunately, I'm not optimistic. It's apparently too counter-intuitive for the US, which has been inundated with the view that DL is a morality issue.
Roger Bohn

>
>  Griffin's idea is to collect a fee from internet service providers --
>  something like $5 per user per month -- and put it into a pool that
>  would be used to compensate songwriters, performers, publishers and
>  music labels. A collecting agency would divvy up the money according
>  to artists' popularity on P2P sites, just as ASCAP and BMI pay
>  songwriters for broadcasts and live performances of their work.
>
>


--


Roger Bohn      Rbohn@UCSD.edu,    Rbohn@MIT.edu
      Professor, University of California, San Diego
      Visiting Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management
       (619) 379-9619     cell

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