Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
Your figures are a bit off.
$5/month from every US income tax payer is not $20 billion a year.
There were just under 139 million income tax payers in 2007. At $60/year, that's $8.34 billion per year, or about 0.6% of total income tax revenue.
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Well I calculated $5 per person and there are 303 million people in the USA. People who don't pay taxes still wouldn't have to pay it, and people paying taxes might thus pay closer to $13 per month in average, based on personal fortune and income.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
US Music sales are over $5 billion a year
US Book sales are over $10 billion a year
US DVD sales are over $20 billion a year
That's at least $35 billion
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Yup, but to that you can subtract the money made by all the intermediaries that become irrelevant with the Internet. If you look only at the money made by artists and the money necessary to produce the artistic content, then you will find that the actual artist and production share of that revenue is currently much lower than $35 billion.
I think it's pretty well known that most artists and authors barely touch 5% to 20% at the maximum of that current industrial revenue.
Thus if Obama snapped his fingers tomorrow for a $5 per person tax, the $20 billion would be enough to instantly cover the costs of all of the artists that are active today and many more new artists. And I am not suggesting either that the old systems go away overnight. Music, Book, DVD, TV ads and Cinema sales can continue under the previous copyright system for as long as corporations don't pollute too much selling them.
Regulations should be put in place though so that those $20 billion of the Obama art tax carefully only is channeled to artists and to financing of artists current and future projects. Contractual transfer of these funds to corporations should be made illegal. The artist should be able to hire people to work for him to help him do better content. But in no way should the artist lose that total artistic control.