There is a discussion going on about founding The Pirate Party in TürkiyeTurkish. Serdar Kuzuloğlu recently said what if there was a tax on sharing?Turkish. The idea is basically you pay a fixed amount of tax for the content you share, regardless of the amount or if you share at all.
This might sound nice at first. If you are pirating music, movies or whatever, and feel guilty, this way you can say I'm paying my tax, therefore my conscience is clear. Pirating is suddenly legit, content is finally free as in free speech. Moreover there is a good sum of money in the Piracy Tax pool now. Yay! We saved the music industry (or content producers in general)! No, you didn’t. You just eased your conscience.
Let’s get real. Suppose you passed the bill of Piracy Tax at the parliament and a good number of people are paying this tax. That’s just one part of the equation. How will this money be distributed? What will determine the relative share between artists? Do we need distributors anymore? Do we even need producers anymore? And most importantly when you cap the total amount of earnings, will this have any negative effects on creativity? And finally which problem exactly is this Piracy Tax solving?
In the comments of Serdar Kuzuloğlu’s post, several people stated that it should be trivial to gather reliable statistics on downloads. This is not true at all. Even if there was a single distributor (I hope we agree this is undesirable) there will be statistical errors. No system is 100% reliable. But HTTP, i.e. web sites are especially not suitable for transactional operations. Aside from this fact, there will likely be a dozen of services. Are you just planning on adding the figures to calculate the final share? How about the differences in these services’ reach? Don’t you think simply adding the figures makes the system easy to game?
Something everybody seems to forget is there will be always piracy a.k.a P2P1. It would take you to the wrong conclusion to assume everybody is the same. Not everybody is using Windows, not everybody has Flash, there are even people who doesn’t have a graphical browser. Do you even know what a text browser is?2 It is not wise to ignore these people because they are the minority. These people are Internet residents, like it or not you are just tourists. They have practically invented the Internet. So please don’t make the mistake of ignoring the possible effects of technologies like tor and the culture of FLOSS.
In any case, statistical errors are unavoidable. I would suggest 3% is an acceptable error margin. Then what happens to the independent artist or the small production company that should have 0.25% and ends up having 0.025% share? Is this fair now? The pirate tax pool would likely benefit the big players and crush the independents. Big players have already been employing portfolio management strategies, independents just can’t do that. It is naive to think Piracy Tax could sweep so called low-quality productions away and elevate finer artists. It will be exactly the opposite.
Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it. (George Bernard Shaw)
Piracy Tax will severe the already severed bonds between the artists (the producers of art) and us (the consumers) even more. When we buy a DVD or CD it is not just bread on the tables. It is also sending the message “I like what you do. Here, I even choose to give my hard earned money willingly to support your art”. Emphasis on willingly and supporting art. It’s not a passive action like listening to the radio. You (consumer) take a conscious step. Your contributions are small materially, but it should mean something to the artist even at the individual level. We need art. It is not just listening to music or whatever. But we need art to compete in the neverending race of civilization. No art, no culture. No culture, no civilization. Lack of civilization is inevitable slavery. So, we need to learn to support our artists willingly and directly. Piracy Tax is an obstacle for this social goal.
What about opting-out? If I opted out will I still be able to use legal download services? If I am not allowed to opt out but I continue pirating3 your download statistics will be further skewed. If this is being done to free the content then why do we have to give up our freedom4. If this is being done to increase the profits of content industry… Well, then it makes sense.
If the free market is a bad idea, why don’t we shift the whole economy to a controlled market? With pirate tax in effect, content industry’s income is not only centralized but falls under government control. The government controls the art. I don’t like that idea. Art should be free. In short I don’t think Piracy Tax is the way to go.
What Is My Proposal Then?
I have been thinking hard about Pirate Party and the problem of piracy. The question is not what should we do about piracy? Unless you want to treat the symptoms. The question is how will content industry adapt to the information age? We adapted to information age quite well, didn’t we? Why can’t they do the same? I don’t want to believe they are so stupid that they don’t really know how. As far as I can understand they don’t want to change. Because change has a price. And they don’t want to pay. They want us to pay the price for them stagnating like that. Let’s stop beating around the bush and see it as it is.
Smart artists are already making the move. They let you download their movies and songs for free, and find other channels of monetization. Lots of concerts for example. Not necessarily huge stadium concerts. If you take all those middlemen out of the equation you don’t have to be all that popular. All in all, it is much better than continuously whine about piracy.
My proposal is not to engage ourselves with Piracy Tax5. There has to be a better solution. At least a solution that doesn’t necessarily make big players more powerful than they are. Let’s support far-sighted artists who take the steps to adapt new conditions for now. And continue to discuss alternatives.
1: I know piracy doesn’t equal to P2P. It is possible to share content legally via P2P networks. Also P2P is not the only channel you can distribute pirate content. I just think they are interchangeable in the context of this post.
2: It does matter. Let’s not go to the extreme. It would be a waste of time and energy for me to even subscribe to a web based service. Torrents are much easier and flexible for me. And I have a graphical browser with Flash capability.
3: See 2 above.
4: Money can buy freedom, any objections?
5: I would like to remind those who would suggest Piracy Tax as a temporary solution; laws might end up being in effect for too long.
