Taxing ISPs to pay record companies
Jon Taplin posted about the music industry and he likes the idea of “taxing” ISPs, which of course really means taxing the ISPs’ users, and giving the money to the RIAA (it would have to be the RIAA, how would such a tax be evenly distributed to artists? How would you really know that a given artist was downloaded more than another and break down the earnings?)
I think it’s a pretty bad idea, but there are a lot of comments and it’s an interesting post.
Here’s what I said:
Another thing: why not tax external hard drive makers, webmail providers, web hosts, browser makers, OS makers, and copy machine makers? All of them are vectors for massive copyright infringement. It’s just a bad idea all around.