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: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: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: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.