France To Tax the Internet To Pay For Music

bs0d3 writes "A new tax in France is aimed at ISPs. The new government tax on ISPs is to help pay for the CNM (Centre National de la Musique). Already in France there is a tax on TV, to pay for public access channels. It's similar to the tax in the United kingdom which pays for the BBC. This ISP tax will be the musical equivalent to that. President Sarkozy comments, 'Globalization is now, and the giants of the internet earn lot of money on the French market. Good for them, but they do not pay a penny in tax to France.' This all began after the music industry accused French ISPs of making billions of dollars on their backs. Now the music industry must also get their hands in their pockets."

Comments

Recoup the lobby dollars

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

Sounds like a corporation's wet dream, tax the peasants for private profits. Then they can use this money to try and convince other governments to do the same.

Re:Recoup the lobby dollars

[Gerzel]

Aye. Though if this goes through and I were French I'd demand there be no more prosecuting bittorrents, or filesharers in France. Sharing music over the web in France logically should be free now as all French internet users have paid for it.

Re:Recoup the lobby dollars

[belg4mit]

Where do you pay an explicit "school tax?" It's usually taken out of property taxes and other general funding streams.
Regardless, educated masses (even only semi-educated ones) are a public good, and you are paying for the benefits
you reap or, if you wish, you are paying back the cost of your education.

Oh good

[betterunixthanunix]

This means that people will not be prosecuted or punished for downloading their music at no cost, right?

Re:Oh good

[ecorona]

I'm pretty sure the music industry gets to tax us for private profits and prosecute us despite the tax. They're businesses and they will do whatever it takes to maximize profit. Right or wrong is not a variable in their equation.

Re:Oh good

[Cyberllama]

The tax isn't to compensate the music industry for downloads, it's to compensate the french government (seriously) for taxes the music industry isn't paying.

Re:Oh good

[Jane Q. Public]

The problem with this scheme (which has been brought up every time a similar idea has been floated in the U.S.), is that it punishes the innocent for the deeds of the non-innocent. It would be rather like taxing American citizens in order to prop up banks that fail or have been robbed.

Oh... wait. FDIC. TARP. Right. What could I have been thinking?

Re:Oh good

[Cley Faye]

That would be a logical step, right ? wrong.

A small summary about how the french government think it can help funding music (and art in general):
- put tax on blank media, check (but the money don't go to artist)
- put tax on internet subscription to fund movie industry, check (search for COSIP tax, but still not a penny for artists)
- put another tax, again on internet subscription, to fund the music industry, in progress (guess who won't get anything from this? artists)

For those that don't know, the fact that we're paying taxes on blank media doesn't mean we can use them to copy our own stuff, and taxes on internet subscriptions doesn't mean anything for both subscribers, and people behind music/movies. Only some cash stream for a few very poor corporations...

So downloads of music are free in France then?

[icebike]

After all, you've paid for it via your ISP, right?

Correction.

[Z00L00K]

It is not a tax to see public channels it's a license fee to own and use a TV receiver.

This also exists in other European countries like Sweden.

Re:Correction.

[Teun]

Indeed, this is not a tax.

Such a levy on accessing TV and radio exists in most Western European countries and it pays for the national broadcasters.
Something that's supported by a majority of the population in the bigger countries like the UK and Germany.

When you don't have a TV or radio you don't pay.

But this French proposal sounds differently, you pay regardless, even when you don't listen to music over the net.
Clearly le Président de la République is shacked up with an artist.

Re:Correction.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I can't speak for the specifics of each country's implementation(and, in practice, many of them probably do a bit of both, with some sort of targeted levy and some level of generic funding for the arts or culture or what have you); but there seem to be three distinct flavors:

1. Some sort of funding out of general tax receipts, as with the National Endowment for the Arts or NPR in the US. The overall level is set by something resembling representative democracy; but there is neither the assertion nor the intention that there is any particular relationship between the stuff being taxed and the stuff being funded, the stuff being funded is just seen to be something by which the public good is served(accurately or not, I'm not hugely interested in arguing on that specific point).

2. Some sort of funding out of a specific category of tax, as with special taxes(in addition to generic sales/VAT) on digital storage media in a number of countries. This category does assert a connection between the thing taxed and the thing funded; but it is marked by the relatively indescriminate nature of the tax: digital storage levies essentially assume that all storage media are used for piracy, for instance.

3. Some sort of funding tied relatively closely to use of(within the limits of gauging that) the thing being funded, as with taxes on motor fuels to fund roads, or taxes on broadcast TV receivers to fund the BBC. This category also asserts a connection between the thing taxed and the thing funded but, unlike #2, makes some(usually imperfect) effort to be accurate: The BBC's fee doesn't cover monitors without TV tuners, motor fuel taxes frequently distinguish between roadway vehicles and agricultural or aviation uses, that sort of thing.

Re:Correction.

[migla]

>That's horrifying.

And yet, this horrific setup is what brings us the BBC and the like, you know, commercially and politically independent television. They don't have to try to appease the advertisers by appealing to the lowest common denominator, instead they can focus on making quality journalism and quality art/entertainment.

If you have half a brain and even if you're blind, you should be able to see a clear difference if you watch one of the commercial channels and compare it to the publicly paid for channels here in Sweden. The former is bullshit crap. The latter is quality television.

Of course, in the US you only get the commercial bullshit crap, so how would you know how much better it could be?

Actually, HBO over there seems to produce some descent quality television. Their model is kind of similar, in that they don't program for the advertisers, but the BBC and the rest are even more free to do their art. It works beautifully. I'm sorry you've never gotten to experience it.

Re:Correction.

[ConaxConax]

That's horrifying.

And yet, this horrific setup is what brings us the BBC and the like, you know, commercially and politically independent television.

You can't be that naive. The Beeb is pretty much the in-house press organ for the Labour Party in the UK.

That's funny, people in Labour say that it works for the Conservatives. Funny how that works huh?