TEOF: Harvard Professor Proposes Socialist Solution to Online Music
Here’s a more detailed rant following a post I just published on the more serious (all things relative) TEOF. In countries such as France and Germany you pay taxes on blank media. What’s very funny is the corruption of government in collusion with big business. See, you pay these taxes whether you put copyrighted content on these media or not (so you’re presumed guilty), and it’s still illegal to copy said content.
How about a big warm go-fuck-yourself? If I pay taxes, I get a service in exchange, ok — you’re not going to get the cake and eat it too, especially when the original content producer is getting zilch in return no matter what. And I’m not paying intermediaries for marketing and distribution functions when I don’t need or use those functions in the first place. That’s basic value chain analysis.
Size of my mp3 collection as of today, counting files I’ve stored on CD-Rs: about 170GB. Add another 150GB or so in divx movies. For reference, the biggest list of files shared online by a single individual that I’ve seen so far weighted about 1.2TB. 1TB+ collections are far from unique if you count files stored on offline media. Why insist on selling me songs for $1 when I’m going to listen to most of them maybe just once a year? Listening to hours of new music (i.e. that you never listened to before) every day is a healthy diet for your ears.