Possible Stealth Tax To Fund Music/Film Industries’ Battles

[...] A possible stealth tax could fund the battle between the music and film industries. [...]

[...] Originally posted here:  Possible Stealth Tax To Fund Music/Film Industries’ Battles … [...]

All 4 of your points are excellent reasons for why people want to download digital media content.

None of your 4 points are justification for the wholesale theft of digital content, which is the direct cause for proposing the new tax.

To put this into perspective, I can produce a similar list of why people like to own cars:

1) Cars save lots of walking, wear and tear on footwear, and the eventual exposure to the elements caused by walking on inclement days, especially involving destinations several miles away.

2) It’s very convenient not to have to chase down a cab, bus or train, and you can travel to exactly where you want to go rather than being relegated to being dropped only where bus stops or train stations are located. And a lot of cabs (and cabbies) just smell bad!

3) It’s way cool to have your own car! The chicks love them! They’re great places to start a family on a whim!

4) A car allows you to travel on your own schedule, any time day or night, without regard for the annoying set schedules of mass transit.

In defense of stealing cars, since people want to possess cars but don’t necessarily want to pay for them, presenting the above list in court will not sway a judge nor a jury to dismiss charges of grand theft if one decides to illegally obtain a car. How silly! Cars should just be free!

But for some unfathomable reason, people think that doing so is sufficient justification for grand theft of copyrighted digital material. Obviously, it is not, hence the need to increase funding to combat the raping of the music and movie industries. Wait, I retract. It’s apparently not obvious to the morally and ethically challenged masses who believe that theft is somehow justified if enough people want to steal. Businesses might as well not bother to collect money for any potential possessions, since everyone would seal them if they had the chance.

A stealth tax? Sounds far more sinister than sharing music with my friends. People generally won’t just buy music blindly, they need to hear it first and see if it jives with their peer, if the music/movie is good people will buy it for their collection. Sharing music should not be called “piracy”. Its a misleading, twisted, and offencive term. “Greedy” is a term that is rightfully earned by the music and film industries. All these companies care about is improving their percentages from the pervious year. If they want to make some real money, they should offer new release material for a 2 cents per song, or 2 dollars per film for download (sorry, I don’t know what the UK equivelant is). Millions of people will become paying customers. They need to realize people will always share with eachother, no matter what is done to prevent it.

I’ve always said, If the Music and Movie Industry wouldn’t be so greedy and put fair prices on published Songs ($1.99) or Movies ($5.00) there wouldn’t be any Piracy.

The same goes for Computer Programs.

Rick above has lost his mind. Rather it is the UK or any other country raising this kind of fund is stealing from the people and giving to the corporations. It is akin to to say Intel telling the US government we are not making a big enough profit you will impose a 5 dollar a month tax on every computer user in the country and then pay it to us. Remember it is corporate greed that got the world into the current financial mess it is in. Yes the housing market fell first, however remember that was because the banks got too greedy. Lets take Microsoft for example. It is estimated that at the end of 2007 it was costing them under 7 dollars per copy of Vista including all over head including the advertising. tell me about a profit margin, and most products are this way. We the world over must reign in businesses once again. At one time music was a cheap form of entertainment until deregulation.

Yep. I think I see your point…

Cars are far too expensive. If car manufacturers only charged $100.00 each for them, they’d sell a lot more cars, and people would stop stealing them. Besides, what right do the car manufacturers have to “overcharge” for their cars anyway? Certainly it can’t really cost $10K, $15K, or $20K each (or more) to build and market a car, even allowing for an outrageous 5% profit margin! How dare they? Only lamers actually go buy a car!

So let’s say I go out and buy a $100.00 car, just a trial version mind you, to see if I like it, if my friends like it, if it’s really as cool as I thought it was going to be. Heck, I’ll take it back if I don’t like it, honest. If I do like it, then I’ll go right back to the car dealer and pay him the additional $19,900 that he is entitled for the full price of the car.

But wait! I’ll ALREADY have the car, having driven it away for only $100! I’d be STUPID to go back and hand more money to the dealer for something I already possess! So, I just won’t do it! Without a limiter build in, I can drive the “trial” car for just as long as a full-priced car! Besides, the car will be out-of-date within 6 months, so I and my friends will be tired of it and I won’t like it any more, it just won’t be cool by then. I’ll just “delete” it and go get the next new “trial” car to drive for a while.

As you can see, the concept of “trying it out” is bogus. When someone downloads digital content to “try it out”, they fully possess it, and won’t bother paying for it later. Well, maybe YOU will, because you’re really honest. But you know that a lot of your friends who are less honest than you won’t bother.

Since the 15 second clip the legitimate paid download sites offer to preview the music or video before purchase is insufficient for you, you go “borrow” the entire music track or movie from a P2P network and “try out” the full product for a little while, say a few months. Music and movies are volitile, meaning the people who grab them get tired of them after a short while, usually less than 3 months, and then they no longer have any value to them, they’ve lost the “cool” factor, that “new car smell”. If you’re like the average P2P MP3 collector, you have hundreds or thousands of MP3s loaded on your player, which you regularly prune by deleting the ones that are no longer cool or you and your friends are tired of listening to. Not a problem, since you didn’t pay anything for the downloaded MP3s in the first place. It would have been a waste of money to have paid for them, since you only expect to listen to them for a few months, with very few exceptions. Now honestly, how often to you play that lamer song that you downloaded last year that you thought was so cool back then? Good thing you didn’t pay for it!

I have asked this question before, but exactly when is the music and movie industry “fairly compensated” for it’s product? What’s the standard, and who gets to decide?

How much money does the buying public have to ante up? Then when they are finally paid off, can we tell these folks “enough already”?

Or is some entertainment executive in the year 2056 allowed to own “rights” to an Elvis Presley song, and continue to profit from the work of an entertainer who has long ago died, and a recording that has been around for 100 years?

I mean c’mon people, these companies are just running scared because we’re tired of getting screwed for the privilege of listening to songs and watching movies that have already been (by all reasonable standards) bought and paid for many times over.

The problem, i think, is that the entertainment industry drastically over values their product.. In the free market everything goes up AND down. Once, entertainment such as music was truely super hot. People did actually spend $40+ a month on albums.
But those days are gone. Entertainment is not “life sustaining” and has taken a back seat to other needs. Buy 2 CDs or use the same $ to get a MONTH worth of cable tv. In this day and age a new cd should cost about $2.50, not $21.00, and that movie that flopped in the theaters is worth even less. Is it the publics fault that some fool with bad business judgment spent $150 million to make that film?? I’ll go without before I foot the bill for their failures and lavish life styles. In fact, we (my family) stopped buying CDs back in 2001 when the RIAA started suing downloaders. We use the radio now…and have found that the record industrys’ products are really worth nothing to us now.
I have a pile of rocks, I can say its worth $100,000,000, but in reality, its still just a pile of rocks. Its only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. And it seems no one wants to pay through the nose for music. Even one dollar a song is way too much. Try a boycott, let them starve for awhile. “Starving artists” I wonder how THAT term ever came about…Maybe they should get real jobs No more “money for nothing and the chicks for free”. Hey I know, the music industry can boycott the music fans, yes, thats it ,produce no new music for a year…..( when the Writers guild went on strike, I never even noticed the difference! Shows how valuable THEY are! HA.)

Lee,

Right on! Well put. Exactly me sentiments. And having grew up in the Los Angeles/ Hollywood area I can testify to the fact that there is a tremendous amount of waste in the “manufacturing” of entertainment products. I worked at a hospital in 1990 where a crew of 50+ spent 2 whole days filming (mostly standing around and collecting a fat paycheck). The result? Less than 10 seconds of the movie “Kindergarten Cop”!

But hey, no problem for the movie-maker, they’ll just charge $15 for admission. Then the theater claims that they don’t make any of that money, so they have to charge $6.25 for a bucket of popcorn (what I just paid when I took my kids to se “Mall Cop”)

So all of you calling down loaders as a group, who’s stealing from whom? Sure we can just “say no”, (which I frequently do) but you tell that to your grade-school kids all of the time. Sure I can do without myself, and I actually prefer a good book to 90% of what the media peddles as “entertainment’ nowadays.

But the question I asked in my earlier post remains. When is it enough? How much should an individual pay for a CD, to get into a movie theater, or for that matter get into Disney World? What’s fair compensation? Or should only the wealthy be privileged to these kinds of entertainment? Funny how no one seems to have an answer. I like your concept Lee, Good ol’ supply and demand for a change!

And one last thought here. These same media companies and “artists” are part-and-parcel the same group of radical left-wing socialists who want forced income redistribution. It would seem that their agenda only applies to us working people, and not their industry, which can use what ever tactics it deems necessary to avoid losing their “livin large” lifestyle.

Comment:
With the current criminal charges and investigations against 4 Lords for taking cash for changing or influencing changes in the law funded by big companies, I wonder if this motion may just slide away.

Question:
Why are songs and films better in the UK than the rest of the World? They must be because we pay more for them and multinational companies are fair and they wouldn’t just overcharge us because they could, would they?

Gut!

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