p2p music download ISP levy


Perhaps you’ve heard about this:
$5 a month for legal P2P could happen sooner than you think
What do you think?
What I see as issues:

  1. There’s no quality assurance in P2P. This should strike the idea down on its own. I don’t want someone downloading a glitchy mp3 and then assuming that’s supposed to be a part of my song.
  2. Underground labels will NEVER see a slice of this pie. EVER. And it will destroy their revenue, utterly. Costs will not even be covered.
  3. How do you enforce this? Does everyone pay? How about those who want to support the artists in a more direct way – are they going to be double-charged? Is there going to be someone running around at the ISP level checking to see who is downloading music with P2P software and then checking to see if they are paying the $5 fee for approved P2P music downloads?
  4. This will destroy music stores that have worked hard to get people to pay money for music. A lot of valuable work will be un-done, and we will be teaching bad lessons when it comes to how our society values music and art in general.

What they appear to be arguing about is how to divide up the money. This is because there is no clear way to do this, and the only thing they can possibly come up with to do it will be a scheme that sees the rich getting the biggest slices of the pie, and the rest will be deemed “immaterial” and will receive nothing.
The only possible way they could hope to attempt to divide the money is by comparing relative sales per quarter and then applying that as a percentage determiner in who gets what. However, by approving a plan like this, you are cannibalizing sales, so your sales figures (which you base percentages off of) become instantly useless, because no one is buying music anymore – they’re all just downloading on the $5 plan. The truth is they have no plan on how to divide the money fairly, because there IS no way to divide the money fairly.
Ladies and gentlemen, this proposed plan is the equivalent of throwing a bunch of DVD’s in a ditch at the side of a highway and charging people $5 to dive in and see what they can get that isn’t scratched or messed up. I’m not putting my name behind it. This is a 100% horrible idea, and so was the CD levy, which, for the record, I have seen $0 from. I am a registered member of SOCAN, and I have registered works. The irony here is that I buy CDr’s to give away my own music on as a promo, and I have to pay a levy on THAT, and some of it ends up in Avril Lavigne’s pocket.
How wrong is that?
Just as wrong as this.

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2 Comments

  1. (not a happy face today ’cause this proposal pissed me off from the start — yeah, great move: assume we’re all crooks, and have the internet specifically to download illegals)
    Very, very well written, Davin. Lets hope feedback like yours ripples loud enough to make a difference.

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