At 6:27 PM -0800 2/14/01, Ray Dillinger wrote:

BTW; I don't generally download music: I tried it and the sound quality of MP3 is crap. I don't use windows; the engineering quality of the product is crap. But I'd still rather pay taxes on hard drives than have snooping software installed in Windows. See, given the choice, I'd rather have taxes rather than snooping software accepted as "normal". -- At least for now.

A tax on a hard drive is a theft, a shake down. Rent-seeking. Why should someone who is not downloading music or images (or whatever it is the tax is allegedly meant to support) be taxed thusly? Should paper be taxed so as to support writers? As to your preference for a tax on hard drives over snooping software in Windows, the solution is to to not use products with such snooping features. Or to find ways to cripple the functionality (as was done with the barcode scanner giveaway of several months back). The "tax" approach is attractive to the thugs for the obvious reasons: more opportunities to shake down the proles and collect a percentage for themselves. Practically, did the "tax" on blank tapes ever "work"? Of course not. Metallica and Eminem did not see meaningful revenues. The tax vanished into the maw of the government, the RIAA and ASCAP bureaucracy, and the pockets of the shake down artists. (But some of us had the last laugh. The "Home Recording Act" tax came with the proviso that unlimited "non-commercial" copying was now unprosecutable. A friend of mine copied more than 4500 CDs onto about a thousand DAT tapes. The DAT tapes were purchased in bulk from a guy in Nashville for about $2 per 4-hour (highest quality) tape. Now, of course, CD-Rs can be purchased in bulk for about $0.28 per 80-minute blank, so my friend is now making mostly CD-Rs. He makes extras for me, for the cost of the materials, so I have about 500 CDs "for free" that are perfectly legal under the Home Recording Act. Of the 28 cents per blank CD-R, how much is going to Limp Biskit?) But, to repeat, a tax like this is a shake down. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns

On Wed, 14 Feb 2001, Tim May wrote:

At 6:27 PM -0800 2/14/01, Ray Dillinger wrote:

...

BTW; I don't generally download music: I tried it and the sound quality of MP3 is crap. I don't use windows; the engineering quality of the product is crap. But I'd still rather pay taxes on hard drives than have snooping software installed in Windows. See, given the choice, I'd rather have taxes rather than snooping software accepted as "normal". -- At least for now.

A tax on a hard drive is a theft, a shake down. Rent-seeking.

No argument here. That's absolutely true. All I'm saying is that I'd rather be subject to theft (at predictable times and in predictable amounts) rather than invasion and monitoring. It's not that one is good; it's just slightly less annoying, inconvenient, and evil. The real solution, of course, is open-content music.

Why should someone who is not downloading music or images (or whatever it is the tax is allegedly meant to support) be taxed thusly?

They shouldn't be. Now, do you *really* want the infrastructure in place that would permit tax collectors to distinguish between those who are and those who aren't? Didn't think so.

Should paper be taxed so as to support writers?

Interesting analogy. I hope someone uses it in court.

As to your preference for a tax on hard drives over snooping software in Windows, the solution is to to not use products with such snooping features. Or to find ways to cripple the functionality (as was done with the barcode scanner giveaway of several months back).

Get real. If they put snooping software in windows, it will be accepted as "normal" within a few years, and the leap is short from there to "legal requirement". I don't want the "legal requirement", and I'm willing to pay money (extortion money if you think about it, but what the hell, that's nothing new where governments are involved) to avoid it.

The "tax" approach is attractive to the thugs for the obvious reasons: more opportunities to shake down the proles and collect a percentage for themselves.

Yep. No argument there; all that means is that in the fight to keep snooping software out of operating systems, political greed is one of the weapons that's on our side. What's your point? Bear

On Fri, 16 Feb 2001, Sampo Syreeni wrote:

On Wed, 14 Feb 2001, Tim May wrote:

...

(But some of us had the last laugh. The "Home Recording Act" tax came with the proviso that unlimited "non-commercial" copying was now unprosecutable.

Many suggest that, when the decision in the Betamax case came along, this freedom was granted de facto for any devices, with or without the AHRA, making the consumer elecronics industry's caving-in over SCMS and device taxes look pretty pathetic.

Somehow I think no one even thinks about creating such a provision, here in Europe...

Many of the blank audio recording media taxes in place in Europe actually do have a provision like this. Similarly, the recently-implemented Canadian blank audio recording media levy (which just happens to be the one I know best for some reason... ) comes with a change in copyright law making legal any personal (copies your use only) copying of audio recordings from any source (even those you don't own). The associated only recovers "losses" associated with this change in the law. This creates a wierd situation where I can legally borrow a friend's recording and make a copy, (and thus this falls under the scope of the levy) but not have them make the copy and give it to me (which doesn't). Generally, I disagree with laws like this one, because some of those paying the levy are not necessarily benefitting proportionally from the new freedom. (In practice, most of the people "benefitting" don't give a wet slap one way or the other whether the copying they're doing is legal). Just my $0.02... -aT

On Sat, 17 Feb 2001, Tim May wrote:

Don't assume that because you don't have some of the same laws we in these united states have is because you have "more freedom."

That *so* wasn't the idea.

As for copying CDs and the Home Recording Act, let me hasten to add that there has _never_ been a prosecution of an individual for copying CDs, before or after the Home Recording Act.

Precisely as in the case of copyright law and its rules for public playback. Those permit some pretty wild interpretations, if stretched to their limit. The record companies simply aren't stupid enough to try. The bad-will aroused by such a move would be far too bad a PR blunder. And if they ever wanted to harrass people via such laws, they would do much what was done during the DeCSS trial - prosecute on the letter of the law, speak to the public about their favorite view-of-the-day of its spirit.

I was merely noting that when the kleptocrats formulated their new "Home Recording Act," the new shakedown tax came with a proviso that made such a prosecution impossible even in principle.

Which is good, considering that dormant law often doesn't stay that way. I'm just worried that if they pass some AHRA type deal over here, what will not be copied is this single acceptable part.

Finland and France and all of the other European "havens of freedom" (yuck yuck) will eventually figure out what these united states and their fascist rulers figured out decades earlier.

If I really thought of Finland as the pinnacle of liberal achievement, I would not be subscribed to this list. Unlearning takes some time, see. Sampo Syreeni <decoy@iki.fi>, aka decoy, student/math/Helsinki university

atek3 wrote:

What a bunch of lame ass looters, at least metallica pretends to take the moral high ground. These pieces of shit want to levy idiotic taxes because "its simple" Screw theses leftists. Articles like this remind me to pray every night that I don't wake up in the People's Republic of Europe.

at least we still have a couple more rights than you do, especially when it comes to copyright. isn't that weird? most europe legislative history sees copyright as a "natural right", while the US does not. yet you have more and worse restrictions on it. examples: where I live, making a copy for a friend is LEGAL. also, pseudo-copies, such as installing a software to your harddisk or "copying" it to the memory in order to execute it do not require any specific allowance, i.e. you don't have to sign away your rights and your firstborn son on some stupid "license agreement". decss is unchallenged over here, and is considered perfectly legal by every legal expert who's opinion was published somewhere where I've seen it. there's good and bad points everywhere. uninformed comments like yours above just reveal a prejudice.

Sampo Syreeni wrote:

...

examples: where I live, making a copy for a friend is LEGAL.

If I'm not entirely mistaken, one part of the legislative efforts this thread started from is *precisely* to make any personal copying of AV material illegal.

I haven't read the latest draft of these proposals, but the older ones I read did not go quite that far. in addition, any such provision would collide with mentioned right, so one or the other would have to go. removing the right to personal copies would open a whole can of worms that I hope our legislators don't want opened.