Swedish Pirate Party needs to support the Culture Tax
Without the permission from Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, I hope he wouldn’t mind, I am here posting the email conversation that I had with him back in September 2007 over email:
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Rick Falkvinge (Piratpartiet)
Date: Sun, Sep 16, 2007 at 4:14 PM
Subject: Re:(Case 7134) Concerts are not enough income for artists
To: CharbaxHi,
sorry for the delay in responding.
Yes, I know about flatrate propositions. I think they are terrible.
The reason is that copyrights rest on three things being static:
1) what is PUBLIC (commercial) vs. PRIVATE (noncommercial) distribution;
2) what is AN CREATOR vs. what is A LISTENER; and
3) what is A MANIFESTATION vs. what is AN IDEA.The first assumption has been evaporated, so some are trying to lick the wounds of the broken system by proposing that the culture-producing elite be compensated by what amounts to a tax.
The problems with this are many. First, nobody has managed to explained the obvious - WHO shall be compensated FOR WHAT, and WHY. No losses have been proven to artists, only to distributors which aren’t needed anymore.
Second, if you assume that there is damage, how the collected tax shall be distributed. I strongly disagree that there is any fair way of measuring this: when blank media (cassette) levies were introduced in the 70s, the measuring came from what was being played on radio. This does not work any more. Any measuring system that involves money WILL be gamed, and any institutionalized measuring system will quickly be technically obsoleted by new p2p technologies.
Third, even if there is loss to the existing system, and there is a fair way of distributing money, why would it be in society’s interest to do so? Everybody wants more money for less work; artists are by no means alone in this aspiration, but it’s usually against society’s interest to grant that wish. This proposal would amount to taxing and hindering a new and more efficient technology in order to subsidize and institutionalize a much less efficient one. It makes absolutely no sense from a macroeconomic point of view.
Fourth and most importantly, the proposal assumes the model of small culture-producing elite that distributes culture top-down to the masses. This is no longer true; in the words of Larry Lessig, we have gone from a “read-only culture” to a “read-write culture” where everybody partakes, shares, remixes, shares again, and where somebody’s work becomes the next person’s idea. This total shift collapses the next two fundaments of copyright. There is no division of creator vs. fan anymore; everybody is a creator. There is no division of manifestation vs. idea anymore; a manifestation becomes an idea as soon it is released.
None of the three assumptions that make copyright possible are true anymore.
Cheers,
Rick Falkvinge (Piratpartiet)—–Original Message—–
From: Charbax
Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2007 04:52:47 +0200
To: Rick Falkvinge
Subject: Concerts are not enough income for artists>I just saw your cool video presentation at Google.
>
>Have you seen the french Global Licence proposition. It’d be a 10€ tax that
>would fund all artists based on popularity and quality of their creations
>and performances. (15 million french Internet users x 10€ per month =
>1.8billion euros per year for artists if this tax was limited to only
>people
>using the Internet, or if it’s a global free culture tax on all citizen then
>it would be 60 million french people x average of 10€ from taxes per month
>would be = 7.2 billion euros per year, much more money than what artists are
>paid today in France)
>
>I think a lot of artists want to earn money for their creations and the
>industry of arranging concerts is so archaic, maybe even more archaic than
>the copyright industry (I’m not saying meeting people in real life is not
>cool, the way it’s currently managed is a mess, we’d need last.fm google
>maps blogs forums to make it better). As for selling band t-shirts is also
>kind of archaic since people want to download the PDF and print the T-shirts
>themselves.
>
>Monitoring popularity and quality of all music, movies, pictures, software
>even text I think is possible by simply using the computers and the Internet
>for what they are for, counting usage, monitoring use, rating and more Web
>2.0 usage without ever having to remove people rights to privacy as the
>usage monitoring can simply happen on a voluntary percentage of all users
>which provide good enough popularity and qualitative statistics.
>
>–
>Charbax,
>Nicolas Charbonnier
>
To which I replied:
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Charbax
Date: Sun, Sep 16, 2007 at 7:30 PM
Subject: Re: (Case 7134) Concerts are not enough income for artists
To: “Rick Falkvinge (Piratpartiet)”Thanks a lot for your reply!
> No losses have been proven to artists, only to distributors which aren’t needed anymore.
Well I think the loss to artists has been the culture and copyright industry until today. It has never worked for artists. I want a system that works much better for artists, and I don’t think telling them they can earn money from concerts and selling T-shirts is going to improve the artists situation.
> how the collected tax shall be distributed. I strongly disagree that there is any fair way of measuring this (…) Any measuring system that involves money WILL be gamed
I believe the Internet and computers provide the perfect tool for measuring this. We just need a good software and a neutral government doing the measurments. It’s like saying neutral website statistics aren’t possible, well I do think it would be possible, just install toolbars such as the Google Toolbar, but instead have it be something like the Last.fm audioscrobbler (which people will install voluntarilly) and have a neutral entity such as the government or the European Union check every users identity and control each users statistics against automation and unusual behaviour, so I think people who will try to game the system can easilly be detected like this.
And also add to that something like Razorback to measure activity on p2p networks, have the state host the Trackers and have every user connecting to the Tracker be identifiable through this same voluntary Last.fm/google Toolbar kind of approach. Where users are checked for their identity only in the purpose of measuring popularity of files and never to be used for any other purpose (such as invading peoples privacy, or using the collected data in a court against the user)
> This proposal would amount to taxing and hindering a new and more efficient technology in order to subsidize and institutionalize a much less efficient one.
I am not exactly following you on that point. Is there anything new and more efficient then p2p filesharing and legalized HTTP streaming and downloads?
Today people are taxed so the government can maintain museums and pay artists in art schools and artists that do exhibitions, public performances, movies, music, everything already somewhat is partially paid for through taxes. I just suggest there should be more weight on the tax-supported art then to leave it at being a commercial activity paid for by centralised investors that take away the rights and the freedom from the artists so that they can make more money.
> There is no division of creator vs. fan anymore; everybody is a creator. There is no division of manifestation vs. idea anymore; a manifestation becomes an idea as soon it is released.
So are you saying there is no need to pay the talented artists so that they can make a living spending their whole time making this art?
I am suggesting many more artists should be able to make a living then today where only a few top artists can make a living and where most of the cultural industries revenue is never even touched by artists.
I’m just suggesting a reorganisation of that revenue and a large expansion of that cultural revenue. I think the artists deserve a much larger revenue than they have today. So to me 5€ per month average per citizen is just a start amount to show how huge this tax would actually mean, 5€ per citizen would expand the global artists revenue by many times compared to what it is today, but that amount could easilly grow when people will realise how much good it brings to be able to support so many new artists, many more then have ever been able to make a living out of their work, ideas and performances.
Also, I think it is certainly possible now much more then ever to find out which person was the initial creator, the artist that initially got an original idea. With digital and analog fingerprinting technology, much more then ever, now we can have a fair means of letting everyone be creative and share their ideas not being afraid of their ideas being robbed and having the knowledge that they could get paid if their idea turns out to be original, useful to the society and appreciated by many people.
Just as with the patent system, the copyright system needs to be brought into the 21st century, and we need to use the computers and the internet to administrate intellectual propriety much better and allow for a free flowing sharing of ideas without forgetting who is the originator of ideas and who have the most talents, thus enabling and integrating many more creators then ever.
I still have the very same opinion on this flatrate culture tax proposition, the same opinion I have had probably back since 2005 or before that. We need an EU wide flatrate for all culture on the Internet. That tax should be levied at the ISP level or even better, it should simply be implemented on all EU citizen (based on each EU citizen’s income levels).
I certainly hope that Rick Falkvinge in Sweden has changed his opinion on this proposition since he replied my email in September 2007 with such dissapointing quote “I know about flatrate propositions. I think they are terrible.”
He then goes on to argue that there are no more artists, that there shouldn’t be a “culture-producing elite be compensated by what amounts to a tax.”
I think he is wrong on thinking that this tax would only have to go to any kind of elite. The whole point of the flatrate culture tax would be to monetize all cultural outputs on the Internet by all Internet users in a totally transparent and equal way!
An example of this might be, if you write a blog post and 500 people read it, you might earn somewhere between 50 cents and 50€ in culture tax based on how much readers liked your text and how much a share it constitutes of those readers usage of culture on the Internet. If you upload a video from your mobile phone to Youtube and 50 thousand people watch it, the culture tax might pay you somewhere around 500€ on top of whatever income you might get from Youtube displaying advertising. Again all based on how much culture is consumed overall by all users, based on how much people like your video (registered by user ratings), based on how original your video is (measured through usage statistics), based on how long time people spend on your video, based on how many people remixed your video and more stuff like that.
Without the implementation of a culture tax on a European level or on a Country level, I don’t think that any of the Pirate Party’s political agenda points will be considered by any other large amount of parlamentarians.