Rosen Floats ISP Fee Idea -- Charge Everybody!

iconian writes "Hillary Rosen of RIAA wants to impose a type of fee to ISPs which in turn will be passed to all their customers indiscriminately to recoup supposed damages done by file-sharing. The RIAA considers downloading music illegally over the Internet to be the moral equivalence of stealing. I wonder then what is the moral equivalence of the RIAA taking realized cash from people who do not download music?"

Comments

Re:I can't believe the ideas the RIAA thinks they.

[arkanes]

Ha! It's not theft if I pay 10 bucks a month to my ISP to pay for it.

Doing the same to the RIAA and MPAA

[billstewart]

Hillary Rosen doesn't realize the depth of the can of worms she's stepped in when she decided to attack the computer and telecommunications industries. While the patents for digital reproduction of music have mostly expired, the copyright law extensions that also gave us the Berne Convention mean that Bell Telephone Laboratories still has the copyright on the songs "1" and "0", and the RIAA had better not go creating derivative works without giving us our cut, because All Their Bits Are Belong to Us.

IBM owns the songs "2" through "9" and "A" through "F" and "SmileyFace", Bell Labs owns "-128" through "-1", "*", "#", and "13" through "127", the CCITT owns "128" through "255", Control Data owns "Negative 0". Digital Equipment owns "-32768"-"-129" and "256"-"32767", except that John Draper seems to have aquired performance rights for "2600" and somebody scribbled on the documentation on "31337", IBM owns "32768-65535", and by now that's covered all the songs you can play on CD. If they're thinking about using other standards, remember that the IEEE currently has all the floating point numbers, plus and minus infinity, and "Not A Number", so there's no place for the RIAA to hide except back in Analog Land.

And, surely if the music industry can tax us for possible downloads, we should be able to tax them for showing computers in their movies and using "computer hackers" in their plots, because they MIGhT NOT HAVE paid the Cyberspace Society of Computer Programmers, Hackers, and Stereotyped Nerdy Teenagers for using them. The tax obviously ought to be paid in movie downloads.

Besides, as a spokesperson for the Cable TV industry (I own about a 3-millionth of Comcast) it's important to remind the RIAA that most of the Cable Modem companies have strict policies against copyright violation, so our users would never do anything like that and she therefore can't tax us for it, and most of them also have strict policies running anything server-like, including file sharing software, which is bizarrely and suicidally clueless (Duhh, why do you think people buy broadband?) but also means that none of *our* users are doing this. However, we do know that the record labels and their "agents" often use the telephone to talk to their artists, so the telephone companies are as much a part of the music production process as the RIAA is, and we'd like our cut now, please.