Mark Cuban has an interesting idea - a copyright tax...he's mostly pissed about wasting taxpayer dollars to sue individuals in support of artists who are already plenty wealthy:
We pay property taxes. We pay use taxes. We pay sales tax. We pay income taxes. Beyond taxes, we pay fees. We pay a fee for our drivers license, our passport, and I don’t know how many other fees that go from our bank accounts to every level of government. In exchange we get some level of service that enable our public servants to protect, honor and serve and to support our system.You can read the rest of the post if you awnt Cuban's solution, which sounds...well, impractical to say the least, mostly due to the already-entrenched copyright holders rights. If you're really interested in the subject of intellectual property law (I am, obviously), you can borrow Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture from me, I'm almost through with it.
I don’t like the idea that my tax money goes to subsidize the 10,300 lawsuits the RIAA has filed since Sept of 2003. How much money does it take from taxpayers to pay for the courts side of the lawsuits? I’m guessing, but with all the administrative people and lawyers involved, judges, their clerks, overhead, and who knows what else is involved. Is 20,000 dollars per lawsuit too high or too low? Could it be 100k dollars each? I don’t know.
On other nerdy news, Congress is attempting to bring back the Broadcast Flag, which would basically make that TiVo you own completely worthless. You can step up here and tell your Congressfellow about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment