CDR: Re: Germans to tax PCs for Lars

[Tim May]

At 1:54 PM -0400 9/6/00, Adam Langley wrote:
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>On Wed, Sep 06, 2000 at 10:27:53AM -0400, David Honig wrote:
>>       BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany is planning to slap new
>>       levies on computer, telecommunications and Internet
>>       products to ensure that authors are properly rewarded for
>>       the use of their work, a newspaper said Wednesday.
>
>Is this really a bad thing? Music is becomming a public service. When author
>cannot control their works (as is happening now) the works basically become
>a public service - and the way public services are funded is by govt taxes.=
>  If
>they stop trying (and failing) to control content and just use this - well
>it's not perfect - but it's better than a DMCA/UCITA world.
>
>My worry is that they distribute this money only to the big record companies
>and screw the 'real musicians'

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.

Might as well tax paper products, pens, pencils, and 
typewriters...because sometimes these are used to copy the works of 
others.

But, as I said, the deeper issue is the "disconnect" between the tax 
and the allegedly "improper use" of some service.

The U.S. have done this many times, of course. In particular, the 
Home Recording Act of 1991, or thereabouts, which slapped a tax on 
blank tapes and let home recording folks copy as much as they wanted 
(so long as they don't sell the tapes). (A friend of mine has over 
4500 CDs copied digitally onto DAT and CD-R. I'm just a piker, having 
only about 500 CDs copied onto DAT and CD-R. Why _buy_ a CD when our 
libraries have tens of thousands of CDs available for borrowing and 
copying?)

And from a practical standpoint, this bad tax (bad in the 
decorrelation, nonmarket sense) also leads us in the wrong direction. 
Instead of the recording companies figuring out technological and 
market solutions, they are relying on "men with guns" to collect 
taxes and, hopefully, with enough lobbyists in Bonn and Berne and 
D.C., to dribble some of these taxes back to the recording companies.

Feh.

--Tim May


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Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
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