The Canadian newspapers recently noted that so-called “artists”(*) are lobbying to have major, longterm extortion - on their behalf - made into law. Similar agendas are being pushed in the US and other jurisdictions, so you aren’t safe either. (*Why did I put “artists” in scare-quotes like that? I’ll explain in another blog.)

It seems that they are unhappy that technology and the entertainment model have moved on from what they grew up with. So they want to impose a “levy” on the sale of all possible recording media and devices so they can recover from all the honest people and the indifferent people the money that they think they are losing to (their opinion) dishonest people.

So they’d have all MP3 players cost an additional 5 or 10 bucks - a thieves tax - that would go to the artists, to make up for all the “illegally downloaded” songs, videos, books, etc. OK, that’s bad enough, but these jerks also want their tax on anything else that could possibly carry a digital representation of their “art”. So that’s computers. Thumb drives/jump drives. Digital voice recorders. Phones. Cameras? All flavors of memory cards and sticks. Of course TiVos and Personal Digital Recorders… Anything that has memory in it.

Now that’s just wrong, on so many levels. But here’s just one. If someone ‘taxes’ me or fines me for having committed a criminal or immoral act, then they are doing so with the eager assistance of my government. When the government says I’m guilty of something then, by gawd, if I have the name I am entitled to have the game. In fact, if they don’t give me a choice in the matter, then I pretty much have a duty to have the game (for which I’ve been given the name - in this case, entertainment data thief).

First off, I don’t like being labeled a thief - and if I’m fined/taxed for theft, then I’m labeled a thief.
Second, it is an imposition on me to give myself the game for which I’ve been named. This’ll come as a shock to many (most?) of you, but there are people who don’t download music and videos, and I’m one of them. I’ve got a stock of a hundred-or-so CDs (remember those?) collected over a span of decades, that I rarely listen to. I’ve got maybe six or eight movie DVDs that I actually bought, instead of renting (both Toy Stories, Shrek, The Right Stuff, and some others I don’t recall). My television shows what the set-top rabbit-ears pull in. Yes,that’s right. I don’t have cable, and I don’t have satellite. Imagine that. Strangest of all, to many of you I’m sure, my life doesn’t have a sound-track. I don’t own an MP3 player (remember that I don’t download music… and I haven’t even got enough interest to rip my existing, legally purchased CDs into MP3 format for more-portable listening).

All of that to say that I don’t owe anything to these conniving bastard “artists” who want to force me to pay a thieves tax every time I purchase a computer, memory, SD card for my camera… well, I wrote the list above, so no need to repeat.

Where was I going with this? Well, I could put aside some time in my days to take “my share” of audio and video files, but I don’t want to. I’ve got no interest. The only thing it would accomplish for me is to get myself a share of what I’m being accused of. I suppose I could set up a computer to be a constant bit-torrent participant, to help other people get “their share” more readily, but still the very requirement is an imposition on me, my resources, my bandwidth.

Allow me to assure you that I’m not alone. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people like me who don’t download music and video, or even ebooks. We might enjoy some music if it happens to be playing, but we don’t have a need to play it constantly.

(Often I find myself moving away from rap and other forms that annoy me, or even from pleasant music that distracts me from my task-of-the-moment.) We might enjoy a TV show if it happens to be on when we happen to be in the mood, but we don’t even bother to time-shift our “favorite” series. We read or we have hobbies or we volunteer. We have lives that don’t need much music or video. Every one of us is being viciously maligned (and stolen from, if the proposed laws get passed) by “artists”.

When you click away from this blog (what? haven’t left yet?) I urge you to do a quick Google search for stats on how many deaf people there are in your country, or in the world. How many of them do you suppose are busily downloading stolen tunes? Why should they pay for something they can’t use? Maybe they make up for it by stealing extra movies? Do you assume that? The “artists” presume them guilty for levy/tax purposes. Do the blind people make up for the videos they fail to download by downloading extra tunes? I don’t know too many blind people, but those that I do rely on their hearing to partially compensate for the missing visual sense. They don’t spend their days with ear-buds blasting rap into their heads, because they need to hear what’s going on around them.

There’s lots more to say on this topic, and I probably will.
Later.

That’s the way I see it, anyway.

Tah.

Copyright February 2008