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

[Frank O'Connor]

Which leads to Evil 3, a combination of Evils 1 and 2.       :)

None of the options I seem so far are mutually exclusive, and most of 
the options I've seen so far look like taking the 'easy way out' and 
involve national governments or consumers of unrelated products 
taking on the cost and inconvenience on behalf of those private 
industries affected .

The various industries and bodies supporting this are going to:

- have to get a lot more creative and investigate amongst other 
things alternative business models, other methods of copyright 
protection and better means of targeting malefactors

- better identify the 'choke points' of the activities that threaten 
their copyright

- not introduce schemes that will by their nature affect product 
competitiveness between nationalities and jurisdictions

- not expect national governments to legislate on ineffectively 
behalf of their narrow interests (that way lies a pluralism that can 
be stifling and introduce bureaucracies of unimaginable intrusiveness)

- not expect the innocent to subsidise the guilty in any scheme they introduce

- not expect the public to take on the cost for their problem (it is 
private industry and private copyright we're talking about here)

- if they do expect national governments and the consumer to pay ... 
to offer commensurate control and benefits back to those who are 
paying for it to compensate them for the cost they are taking on 
board.

.... before they get any support from this little black duck.

				Regards,

At 4:23 PM +1000 16/1/01, 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.
>
>RC
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Damien Miller [mailto:djm@mindrot.org]
>Sent: Tuesday, 16 January 2001 14:28
>To: ggm@dstc.edu.au
>Cc: link@www.anu.edu.au
>Subject: Re: [LINK] France to tax I.T. devices to raise copyright levy
>
>
>On Tue, 16 Jan 2001 ggm@dstc.edu.au wrote:
>
>>  The idea is great. the amount of levy is stupidly high. Oh well, half a
>fix
>
>The idea is horrid - there are many more uses for CDR and DVD-RAM than
>copying other people's music and software.
>
>-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

-- 
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