Even IFPI’s John “sue-them-all” Kennedy seemed to agree with the idea…

No he didn’t. At a press conference he was proud of killing flat fee licensing in France:

RIAA talks flat fees, and how they turned the French [The Register]

Nederland people, if you look for a good solution you will find it and will be over all the others countries once again. Good luck !

I don’t understand a word of Dutch. Can you translate what Vam Dam is talking about here?[/quote]

How amusing :)

I followed the link, you provided and Van Dam basically writes, that this whole story, published at NU.nl is yet another media rumor. Or with other words, gossip!

Cheers,

Marti van Lin
Maastricht (NL)

greetz.>dumble
(sorry for my bad english)

Ban DRM, legalize filesharing, and tax the MPAA/RIAA enough to pay for everyone in the country to have free broadband internet service.

Holland is considering banning DRM and making Filesharing legalized in Holland, the drawback would be that internet traffic would be taxed to compensate music industry.
This is a little bit impractical, there is legal traffic also, and how about movi…

http://www.eff.org/share/collective_lic_wp.php

Or that they have read “Promises To Keep” and have found a good model for making sure that artists get paid and that society benefits.

Your are right about YouTube though. This model implicitly criminalizes all filesharing in order to make all filesharing legal.

Meant to compensate the industry for losses via p2p music sharing, it has cited in court as a reason why Canadian users couldn’t be subpoenaed as requested by the CRIA folks.

Kind of a precedent to this idea.

What people are not realizing is that this will be an Universal thing – everyone with an Internet connection in Holland will have to pay a charge, never mind if they download or not.

Not too fair – user pay is a better principle, imo.

Many thanks for your kind help. But I’m not so sure that “there is really nothing spectacular going on in Holland”. Last week there was an article on the NYTimes telling that the climate during the MIDEM expo at Cannes was much more propitious to a sort of blanket licensing for filesharing, albeit only for music. Even IFPI’s John “sue-them-all” Kennedy seemed to agree with the idea…

Translation in a nutshell:

In this personal statement he says that an interview he gave for a magazine of the dutch copyright organization (BUMA-STEMRA) was misinterpreted.
He commented that the battle against downloadpiracy is lost.
If the music industry would stop fighting internetpiracy they should get more compensation for that, and it would be more logical to tax the internetconnections than mp3-players or DVD’s and CD’s. Since the music industry is stil pursueing another direction, namely sueing the individual that downloads illegaly, this discussion is hypothetical.

end of translation

I hope ths makes some sense to you and shows there is really nothing spectacular going on in Holland in this area.

I wonder how they would distribute that money if it ever comes this far. btw there already is a kind of tax on cd’s and dvd’s in the Netherlands.

In general – What if governments became (or contracted) data repositories, where they housed every bit ever recorded, then you could download it, but there was a tax on it, so everyone could get everything, and people (business license required?) who posted their content would get some proportion of the tax. I haven’t thought about all the implications, but it’s a thought.

Case in point, fees collected from passengers that are supposed to upgrade airports but instead are sucked into the general treasure and used to bomb people – or worse, get politicians reelected.

Konan

I don’t see music, and all other forms of entertainment, as information. It’s used for personal enjoyment.
You shouldn’t compare artistic creations to bare information, more like a paid service.

The arguments listed here show no insight for the international implications of such a move. They need to bring actual experts in international law before continuing. Possibly build this into an international forum for the advancement of intellectual property rights law.

I don’t understand a word of Dutch. Can you translate what Vam Dam is talking about here?

“The battle against piracy is lost” Well, duh. Information demands freedom. Period.

“First of all, illegal music downloads are just a small percentage of all files that are swapped illegally. What about movies and software, will those companies be compensated too?” No. We’ll just get rid of them with Open Source. Ok, fine. Yes, until we do.

“A bad idea if you ask me. It is good to see that politicians are exploring alternative methods to overcome piracy, but this one is quite ridiculous. This clearly shows how alienated politicians sometimes are from the real (or virtual) world.” Heh, heh. Columnist? You’re brainwashed. Go home.

People should be encouraged to enjoy our rich culture, and paying item-by-item doesn’t do that. Get a grant, give for free. Or do a data tax. I’m fine with that. In fact, that’s awesome. Why not learn everything? Why not experience everything? Why not benefit for everything. Lucky Europeans.

Until then, I’ll be distributing Linux, OOo and Firefox to people at every opportunity. Making windows free wouldn’t make it less restrictive source-wise.

I still take issue with the law presuming guilt – that because I’m online that I’m going to violate copyright law – but if there has to be a compromise, that’s not a terrible one.