[LINK] FC: Recording industry wants to scan .au university computers (fwd)

[Chirgwin, Richard]

Glen - IIRC, the precedent already exists. Once upon a time, there was a
digital cassette tape format ... and I'm durn sure the EMIs of the world
screwed a levy out of the manufacturers. How many people ended up buying
digital casette players?

RC

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Glen Turner [mailto:glen.turner@aarnet.edu.au]
> Sent: Thursday, 20 February 2003 14:33
> To: link@www.anu.edu.au
> Subject: Re: [LINK] FC: Recording industry wants to scan .au 
> university
> computers (fwd)
> 
> 
> Timothy Michael O'Leary wrote:
> > Universities exist all over the world, they don't like to 
> break the law 
> > or even be contentious with opinions (despite academic 
> freedom rhetoric) 
> > and they have shiploads of yoofs to reach easily.
> 
> The unis, crying poor in every Wednesday's "Australian", are going
> to put in a funding proposal to DEST to give millions of dollars
> to the recording industry?  Or maybe they'll cut staff and courses
> to fund the payment?
> 
> As someone else mentioned, I think the recording industry
> is trying to leverage their US experience into Australia.
> I'm not sure how relevant the US experience is:
> 
>   - Australian unis don't have significant proportions
>     of their students in dorm accoomodation.
> 
>   - Australian unis pay for Internet by the byte, so they're
>     not going to allow huge amounts of MP3 traffic.
> 
> > A cheap way to generate publicity and put pressure on 
> governments to 
> > bring in a blank CD tax.
> 
> Has anyone seen the fine print for this proposal.  I went
> looking for it but couldn't find anything more than
> media releases.
> 
> It's not the CD tax which worries me, but that such as tax
> would be a precedent for a hard disk tax and a flash memory
> tax as music players move away from CD formats.  If they
> want $1 per storage for 20 songs, then buying a hard disk
> in the future will be very expensive (about $500 for the
> largest hard disk now).
> 
> -- 
>   Glen Turner                (08) 8303 3936 or +61 8 8303 3936
>   Australian Academic and Research Network   www.aarnet.edu.au
> 
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