Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Actually, the industries could have controlled "the game" if they'd wanted to, simply by forcing the middleman--the ISP--to pay a "tax" for transmitted music, much like the "tax" we paid per blank cassette tape to cover their expected losses, and let the ISP pass the cost on to us. In fact, if they did it that way, the added cost per person would have been so small as to be negligible (most of us pay more through inflation every year). This plan would have been so painless as to render the whole MP3 issue a non-starter.
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This is a tricky issue. Would you say the ISP had to track the actual data they pass through ("This is HTML - okay, no problem... This is an MP3 - add the copyright tax"). There are MP3s available for free, so they would have to have some kind of (huge) database to check for the legal status of each piece of data.
A different implementation would say "We'll add 10 cents of 'copyright tax' for every G you download" - much like the cassette tape tax. However, would that imply a "license" to freely download copyrighted works? Or would that still be illegal and this would be some kind of "statistical fine"?
I am heavily opposed to the latter. I think the cassette tax was like that. "It's illegal to copy music, but we know you'll do it anyway so we've added a precautionary fine."
Imagine you would have to pay a few hunderd bucks extra when you buy a car "just in case you break the speed limit and there's no cop around to notice"?
I don't think this would fly.