[LINK] France to tax I.T. devices to raise copyright levy

[Damien Miller]

On Tue, 16 Jan 2001, Chirgwin, Richard wrote:

> Horrible it may be, Damien - but it might be a "lesser of two evils".
> 
> Evil 1: Hollywood successfully lobbies computer who put "optional" copy
> protection inside hardware; what's optional today becomes compulsory
> tomorrow; and little by little we lose our liberties;
> 
> Evil 2: We pay a levy; some fairly, some unfairly; but at least that's less
> intrusive than Evil 1.
 
I find it difficult to believe that a levy will do anything to prevent
the proliferation of copy-protecion technologies and will amount to
anything more than a handout to the content industries.

The only point at which the content companies could conclusively be 
silenced is when the price of the blank media is equal to the price
of an average copyrighted work. I imagine that they would lobby hard
to push the per-media tax towards this asymptote.

-d

-- 
| ``We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on | Damien Miller -
| a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the | <djm@mindrot.org>
| works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, / 
| we know this is not true.'' - Robert Wilensky UCB / http://www.mindrot.org