The RIAA wants to charge broandband users $5 a month because of online piracy. | Hacker News Reader

The RIAA wants to charge broandband users $5 a month because of online piracy.

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Sure, the RIAA get's $5/mo, then the MPAA will want $10/mo. Television isn't covered under RIAA or MPAA, so they'll need, say, a $5/mo surcharge as well. Naturally, the BSA will want $5/mo too. Next, comes the book publishers who will only want $3/mo. Then, the audiobook publishers, which aren't represented by the RIAA, want $3/mo too. But wait! The game publishers aren't in on the action yet either. They want $3/mo. Newspaper and magazine publishers are satisfied with a modest $1/mo.

So far, we have a total of a $35/mo surcharge on your internet bill just in case you should happen to download copyrighted content. And that's not even covering the more niche copyright holders such as photographers, graphic designers, and 3D modelers.

Whether ISPs will be willing to ante up remains far from clear, especially since many users can be expected to protest the extra charge.

Whether the snowball will stay frozen in hell remains unclear, especially since the temperature can be expected to exceed 5000 degrees.

There actually could be a business here. Start an new ISP and make a deal with the movie and record labels that you'll charge your users $10 more a month to compensate the artists as long as your users can download as many movies and songs as they want without fear of lawsuits.

This post turned out rather bipolar. Please bear with me.

I might bite on such a deal... It doesn't, however, give full moral absolution as RIAA/MPAA only covers a subset of all the artists hit by file sharing. And at that, they only support the guys I wouldn't give a dime. So on second thought, perhaps I might not bite on such a deal.

It is a good idea, though..if we could somehow push in some organization which fairly distributes the copyright infringement tax (fat chance of that!) artists could be fairly compensated for whatever amount of money we can finally agree they lose to "illegal downloads".

On another note..your idea wouldn't work after all, because it would be voluntary, and hence the MAFIAA wouldn't get the coverage they slaver for.

Even if a copyright tax could be successfully implemented, it would, as the history of such taxes suggests, remain in place indefinitely, even long after it has lost its relevance. Which is incredibly stupid. Why can't we cover this budgetary post with the money from a tax instituted to pay the welfare of coach drivers removed from business by the automobile, or something in that vein?

All things considered, this idea seems just as harebrained as everything the RIAA comes up with...

Ha! You don't grok the RIAA. More likely they'll sue you especially, because if you're willing to pay the $10 you must be pirating.

They already have something like this in place in Denmark. Whenever you buy blank CD's, DVD's or other storage media you pay a fee to copydan. This money then goes to the artists. Of course this doesn't make it legal to use the media you bought to actually store music you haven't bought.

It's insane - you pay and get nothing in return...

In the US there is a royalty fee paid for each blank cd that is labeled for "music" use. Also manufacturers for certain recording devices pay royalties whose cost is passed on to the consumer. Every time you buy a VCR/Audio Tape Player/DVR(?) you're probably implicitly paying the RIAA some money.

If you really think about it from their position, it sorta makes sense. If they're already receiving payments for some devices that facilitate recording, then in their minds they should get payments for copying over a network as well. Interestingly enough, I believe "computer peripherals" are excempt from this tax/levy/royalty.

interesting, I didn't know other countries had something similar.

The fallacy, of course, is that you don't get to legally copy any music even though you pay. Basically it's just a subsidy to the music business.

this is one of the few ideas to come out of the riaa that i think might actually be worthwile.

imagine this: -ISP's charge an extra $10-20 per month. -Your internet access comes with free access to music/movies/tv/bloggers, etc, whichever media conglomerates opt in -You have free access to their media -The extra fee is appropriately distributed to wherever your bandwidth goes.

Yes, it needs to be refined/rethought, but the idea of charging for content at the ISP level solves a lot of problems.

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