RIAA encourages Piracy
RIAA has accepted that it can’t stop piracy and tries to makes money by introducing a new tax. RIAA wants to collect a $5 fee per user per month from the internet service providers (ISP).
The money will be used to compensate the performers, music labels and songwriters, the collected money will be divided according with the artist popularity on P2P networks.
If they manage to surcharge the ISP, this would mean that downloading music from P2P is legal, and if all internet users will be charged it will be mandatory to download music. This tax will make music cheaper, who will buy an iTune for 99¢ when they already pay $5 and can download millions of song.
There are many unknowns about this tax, will all the internet user have to pay or only those that download illegal content, how will they verify if a user is downloading a game or an album. Because of this question I doubt that the tax will be applied.
Source: Wired News
Tags: Things
March 14th, 2008 at 8:56 pm
What I’m not so sure about is whether or not it will be legal to share music. It’s hard for me to imagine the RIAA giving up sueing the crap out of everybody they can get their hands on.
March 15th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Ha! Any ISP that enforces this tax will hastily lose all their customers. The RIAA _wants_ to do this; they’re not _going_ to do this. Good luck on finding anyone powerful to tax the Internet. Haha!
March 16th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Uh huh. So once the RIAA has their cut, obviously every other industry whose intellectual property rights are being challenged by the internet will get theirs as well, right? That is; film studios, phone companies, newspapers, publishers, television networks, the postal service, calendar printers, board game makers, and the people who make those digital photo frames… OK well I got a bit facetious towards the end, but you get the point. I think everyone, myself included, would *like* to get paid $5 per internet user per month - but it’s not gonna happen.
March 16th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Except, they wouldn’t lose customers.
Would you rather pay $5 a month, or be fined a ridiculous amount of money/go to jail for five years.
I would rather pay $5 a month.
Plus, its not for certain. But Piracy is a huge problem in America (Not to mention world-wide). Ive done some reasearch on Piracy, and im a supporter but it really discourages capitalism.
March 16th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
This sounds great, i would gladly pay just 5 dollars every month to be COMPLETELY IMMUNE to prosecution for downloading as many movies and mp3s as i want.
March 16th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Proxy thru china… and boom, tax them
March 16th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
No way do I want to pay $5 a month. I don’t listen to music from the net. I don’t download music (legal or illegal) from the net.
I listen to talk radio when I’m in my car.
Why should I pay for something I do not use whatsoever?
March 16th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
I love how the RIAA knows that they can do NOTHING to stop the “get stuff for free” movement. So they have a board meeting and are like:
RIAA douche 1: So,..ummmmm how about plan b.
RIAA douche 2: We have a plan b, I though we were just going to sue people
RIAA douche 1: Well that isn’t working out, so lets call all the ISP’s and tell them to add 5 more bucks to everyone’s bill
RIAA douche 2: were still going to get payed right,…
March 16th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
I wouldn’t mind an extra $5 a month, so long as my .torrent traffic isn’t being shaped *ahemcomcast* or completely shut down.
Sure proxy or ip hiding software works for awhile, but after a time it’ll just get old. They just need to give in period. Sales won’t go down exponentially unless a certain artist goes crazy *ahemmichealjackson* then it’s only to their fault, not the p2p junkies.
w00t at Xander’s: “Completely Immune” catch-phrase. I think it’d work!
March 16th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
This is great an all those who download music and movies, but since RIAA hasn’t paid those they claim to protect how/why would anyone believe that another tax would? Perhaps its time to get rid of useless government agencies such as this. They have spent more money then they have or ever will collect. They are the true pirates here.
March 16th, 2008 at 9:22 pm
To those saying they’re happy to pay the RIAA $5 a month for downloading music: Remember that’s just for MUSIC ONLY, which is all the RIAA (remember - RECORDING Industry Ass. of America) handles.
Do you REALLY want to pay $5 for music alone? Then ANOTHER $5 per month for movies? And ANOTHER $5 per month for TV shows? And ANOTHER $5 for pop clips? And ANOTHER $5 for games? And ANOTHER $5 for software? And ANOTHER $5 for… you get the idea. This is what this is REALLY about.
Then, once it comes in at a nice reasonable $5, how long before it quietly hikes up to $6? $10? $20?
What if I release one of my own tracks on the Internet? Is the RIAA going to compensate me out of all this? Noooo. Only their “registered” favourites will see anything, if even them. That money will fund the record execs’ coke parties, yachts and mansions just like your CD purchases do now. The actual artists will see diddly-squat out of this scheme!
NO. Just… No.
March 17th, 2008 at 2:11 am
This is ridiculous. *Most* artists are not represented by the RIAA. How is this supposed to compensate them? It’s not. There is no way this is a feasible alternative to coming up with a functional form of online music distribution.
March 17th, 2008 at 3:04 am
John, you listed industries that might try to claim a tax if the RIAA got one - The post office, phone companies, etc., cannot sue over a threat to their monopoly. Copyrighted shit is an entirely different story.
March 17th, 2008 at 4:30 am
In Holland we have a tax on writable CD’s/DVD’s to compensate artists and software writers for downloading. The tax however makes it not legal to download music and software. So it’s more of a fine then a tax and punnishes people who do not download by taxing their discs. It’s a stupid solution for a problem the industry has to fix itself.
Stop punnishing your own costumers!
March 17th, 2008 at 8:09 am
@Hushed
“[...] discourages capitalism.”
GREAT! +1 for piracy!
thank you for your time,
fK
March 17th, 2008 at 8:58 am
Thats ridiculous, its just another attempt from the RIAA to save themselves from an already sinking ship. They are clearly grasping at straws when they want everyone with internet to give cash to them.
Its just a desperate attempt to feed a dying business.
i say just let the RIAA pass away and see what comes afterwards
March 17th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
There is also a ‘compensation cost’ in recordable CD’s and DVD’s that goes to record companies. It’s also in Hard Drives and everywhere…
Think about if it was made technically impossible to ‘illegally download’ anything back 10 years ago. Would we have developed fast internet and storage capacities? FOR WHAT?
March 17th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
to be specific the compensation cost on cds and dvds were for the burnable “Audio” cds and “authoring” dvds that cost more then just burnables due to that compensation(they where the ones on the shelf that no one ever bought cause they cost too much and they guy at the store said there wasn’t a difference) it couldn’t be general cause a common consumer using it for say accounting data backups and home movies shouldn’t have to pay that fee, that and its a pretty small fee on a spindle of 50 cds for 20$.
as for internet tax, great in concept for the riaa, but next would likely be a cap of x Gigs transfer per month(if you don’t already have it) and higher prices for more transfers cause what else would you use that extra bandwidth for legit surfing and email that could barely add up to 5-10 gigs a month at best? even if the riaa doesn’t get extra for the different cap levels cause it would be isp independent it would be the next step. so like the “audio burnables” that no one buys its another epic fail on the riaa’s part but this time we may lose in the long run!
the only ones who had the right idea was apple and itunes, if they could lower their prices a bit they would be set.