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Originally Posted by Happ
We’d better be clear on this: you cannot hold these two beliefs on pain of inconsistency:
1) Most people will pay voluntarily if given the chance for something they can easily get for free;
2) The system in which people pay for what they read is doomed.
A good reason to be against DRM is 1. 2 is a good reason for wanting a good DRM system in place — and the best kind of system so far is iTunes and ePub with DRM. Both suck, but work for most people. Now, if we push for a tax system, it is because we do not believe in 1. This means the tax system is competing not with people paying for what they read, but with a DRM system. What on earth can make anyone believe that a tax system, with all its Orwellian shadows, is better than DRM?
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The reason to be against DRM is that it limits the use of what you buy in an unreasonable way. Nobody here has pushed a tax system. It was just mentioned as one possible alternative. Many countries already have tax systems supporting creators. For example money is payed to authors when a book is borrowed from a library. I cannot see any Orwellian in that. Actually DRM systems can be very Orwellian since it can give companies a lot of information about people.
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A payment system is fair if 1) pays the authors and 2) those who use what the authors created are the ones who pay them. A system is unfair if 1) authors are not paid, either directly or indirectly and 2) it is not those who use the authors’ creations that primarily pay them, but rather someone else.
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Are you saying this is a definition of fair? This is just an arbitrary choice. You can define it as fair if better quality of the work gives more money. Or you can define it as fair if the system give maximal happiness. Or something else.