At 06:15 AM 9/7/00 -0400, Tom Vogt wrote:
Tim May wrote:
You're missing a more important point: there is no correlation between who is using the service or product and who is paying the tax.
Taxing a computer used for video game playing, for example, when absolutely no "piracy" is happening from that computer. An overly wide net.
Governments like this sort of thing, however. Tax everyone, then spend the revenues as they wish.
not quite right. it is NOT the government that collects, and this is not a tax. there's a "non-profit" organisation called GEMA that collects and re-distributes these things.
the system has been the subject of criticism often, but works surprisingly well. that might be because the article doesn't mention the OTHER side of it. for example, paying a fixed sum to GEMA enables you to play music in public (say, as a shop owner in your shop) without having to deal with the individual artists and labels for "broadcasting rights". it greatly simplifies things for small shops.
So does the proposed law require companies to pay GEMA if they make or sell anything in this category? If they don't pay, what happens? Lawsuit? Criminal prosecution? I don't expect that US newspaper reporting gets the details precisely correct. In the US, there are a couple of organizations, I think ASCAP and BMI, (American Society of Composers, Artists, and Performers) that manage the intellectual property rights for most musicians. If you play music on the radio or do other public performances, you have to pay them their standard rates. It's not mandatory - there are non-ASCAP musicians, and radio stations (particularly religious talk/music stations) that don't participate, but if you play music from their members on the radio without a license from them, they'll sue for copyright infringement. (The main reason religious radio stations often don't use ASCAP is that they're a niche market, but the payments to ASCAP cover the whole market and are priced high enough that stations that don't play new commercial music don't want to pay that much. Of course, some of them just don't like sex, drugs, and rock&roll :-) Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639