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A key change at iCommons
If you're not part of the iCommons mailing list, take a look at the letter that Heather Ford, Executive Director of iCommons, sent to the list yesterday:
Dear friends,
At the 2 August iCommons Board Meeting, the board decided to make some difficult but necessary changes at iCommons. It has become clear over the past months that our vision for iCommons is different from the... more
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"Blank-Media Taxing" Anything in Sight?
Francis Deblauwe · Saratoga, CA (United States) · Jul 17th, 2008 11:27 pm · 25 votes · no comments made
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| Contents of my handbag by Annia316 (Austria), by Annia316 |
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Belgian Music Industry Gets Even Greedier
As in most European countries, a tax is levied on blank media in Belgium. The entertainment industry argues that this serves to compensate for the lost royalties from "pirated" music, i.e., copying and passing around of songs. This was originally aimed at cassettes (1996) but expanded to include CDs (2004). (As we all know, the movie and TV industry followed in the path blazed by the music labels.; I'll focus here on the music side only) Now, however, the Belgian music business (represented by Auvibel) is seeing its income from blank-media decline and is looking for a new culprit: iPods and USB sticks! After all, iPods and other MP3 players are specifically designed to contain copies of songs. USB sticks are more multipurpose but so are CDs and that didn't stop them from lobbying the national legislators to impose a tax on them too. Fortunately, the Belgian authorities are reluctant to introduce this new tax levied per gigabyte.
No matter where you stand on this issue, it is definitely ironic how the industry always seems to put short-term gain ahead of sound long-term business practices and ends up with unintended consequences. Remember the 1980s when we were forced to move from analog vinyl records to digital CDs? These new shiny discs were promised to be almost indestructible, offer superior audio quality, not be more expensive, etc. Needless to say, none of this came to pass: scratches don't just introduce annoying distortions as with vinyl, now they can destroy whole songs. People still argue over that supposed gain in audio quality and the prices have only gone up even though CDs are cheaper to produce. Anyway, the industry was happy because most of us dutifully bought a CD player and repurchased many of the albums in our record collection: pure profit for the industry. They didn't consider that the digital format made it much easier to copy music and were then doomed to play catch-up with people they had no experience with: computer aficionados. We all know the result: overreaction with harsh, blunt measures that only serve to alienate all music fans, the ones who play by the official rules as well as the others. The Belgian musician Milow has an interesting take on all this on his blog (in Dutch, sorry)¬—don't forget to read the animated but strangely civil comment thread. He reminisces how he used to copy music all the time before he became a professional musician himself and feels that it's not the end of the world. It increases attendance at his live concerts, for instance.
Anyway, this blank-media tax trend shows no signs of abating yet: a new iPod tax has also been proposed in the UK. A similar tax is being hashed out in the Canadian courts. Where will it stop? After all, don't we copy our iTunes purchases and CDs on our computer hard drive? Finally, relevant European Union directives actually indicate that these blank-media taxes should eventually disappear as DRM systems become more widespread. Any chance of that happening?
tags: belgium policy-law local-context-global-commons music blank-media-tax
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