Bill Henderson has an op-ed in the Georgia Straight (which btw has been providing a great diversity of perspectives on copyright) promoting the Songwriters Association of Canada legalized P2P proposal.
Bill Henderson on the SAC Proposal
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SAC has softened it a bit…
Although there are still parts of the proposal that I have problems with. First of all, it is an opt-out system, not opt-in… basically a negative option billing scheme, which, if I understand it correctly is banned.
Secondly, it specifically mentions that broadband and wireless customers would have the option to opt-out. What about dial-up subscribers? Will they be billed and not have the option to opt-out? Dialup users are even less likely to engage in this simply because it isn’t particularly useful at dialup speeds (for instance, at home I get 26.4 kbps… at that speed, it takes about 40 minutes to download a 3 minute song).
They might get a better reception if it was an opt-in system.
Then what
Thats like the last time when this topic was brought up here, around a year ago, and some song writer association wanted people to pay something like 5$/month to download all they want.
Again, I’ll make the same argument using only Bell Canada stated figure of over 2-million internet subscribers (think this may have only been high speed)
5$/month x 2-million = $10,000,000 a month
Thats an insane value for only 1 ISP in Canada.
+ the hundreds of million in their levy.
I would rather see money like that funneled into health care or research into diseases like cancer or leukemia etc.
After 3 years then what? They will want to increase it to 8$/month because they aren’t making enough. Music only?
Voluntary?
Why not just make a new tax line on the income tax? Artist tax. If you bought so much and have receipts, then the value should be 0$.
What would people pay per year on their income tax for such an Artist tax? Worth 60$/year? And if you can prove you bought say some arbitrary number like 120$ worth should it be 0 on the tax line?
But instead he is just saying give me.