France will cut funding to its piracy police | Hacker News Reader

France will cut funding to its piracy police

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55 pointsiProject13 comments

It was something the new socialist government was bound to do, the only question was when and how. Cutting budget seems like the smartest way to do this, given the economic context.

Now let's see if they try what they were preaching 3 years ago, that every citizen pays a monthly tax and then can legally download anything he wants for free.

I for one am against the tax thing. I just can't make any sense of it and I don't see why some of my money should go to artists I don't support.

If the link between creation and income is destroyed, then who gets to set who earns what?

Also, I maintain a list of music I like. I make sure I give back generously in one form or another to artists I like. That's why I've got hundreds of actual physical records. I sort the list using different criteria such as the perceived value of the record that made me tick, the perceived value of the artist/band's overall career, the artist/band's visibility, whether the artist/band actually need the money, etc...

Now, I need to precise that bands I listen to are pretty obscure, sometimes are side-activities for those involved and usually don't come any close to paying the bills.

I see two issues hiding

1. the greed of consumers who want the stuff for nothing and don't care about how artists eat and tour

2. the greed of record labels who don't believe another model is possible (listen and then decide if it's worth one's money)

I'm all for bandcamp-like structure that help serendipity as well as letting artists and sometimes listeners decide for their own.

I'm not saying I favor their solution, just that it would be consistent since they fought for it when the right wing had majority rule.

The biggest issue I see is, since it would involve some sort of administrative power to redistribute, it would cause pretty crazy costs and inefficiences, thus annihilating the intended effect.

Now, cutting Hadopi is a step in the right direction, but I don't see this government leaving it be afterwards, since "let the market decide" is really not a popular way to do things in France, especially among socialists.

I could tell you were not backing the idea of the tax but as it sounds like a good idea at first, I wanted to balance it a bit. Indeed, the point you raise is sound.

I don't know how you feel about economic decisions in France but my impression is that they are all broken. Both the left-wing and the right-wing do very similar things while preaching by their colored book and saying the other side is doing it wrong.

I attribute the lack of economic direction and growth in France to both sides. What I find irritating is their tendency (on either sides) to make short-sighted decisions and follow the hype of the moment (effet d'annonce) which effectively means nothing can really be done on the long term when current affairs shuffle it all every once in a while.

From afar, it does look like a poorly handled country and no amount of red or blue changes anything to it.

I feel the same, and most of the people I know (ie young graduates related to tech/marketing) do too. I would argue that's also the case in the general population because in the last presidential election nearly 18 percent voted for the far right wing. Which nowadays is essentially a xenophobic socialist party.

I think it has to do with the poor handling of economics by French politicians. The economy has become the center of everything in political life, but the people handling it seem to have little knowledge of it or to be constantly restrained by old dogmas (mid-20th socialism for the left wing and extreme liberalism for the right wing).

For instance Sarkozy kept talking about creating a startup ecosystem in France similar to the one in SV (we have the engineers, the legacy and the ambition, so why not ?) but nothing effective was really done : when the real issues lied in financing and legal problems, he launched a program to build a gigantic technological campus somewhere in the south of Paris for 2030.

Hollande kept talking about entrepreneurs and creation, but has yet to act on it. Plus, how can you foster an entrepreneurial environment when you consider earning more than minimum wage is evil (unless of course you are paid by the State) ?

So I guess you could say France is very poorly handled, and the end of it seems nowhere close. The only glimmer of hope I can see right now is the crisis forcing us into a federal and democratic european union - maybe with the help of British and German politicians will we finally be able to run our country properly !

For someone like me, who doesn't actually consume (and don't pirate) much of the content covered by those laws and taxes, I kinda feel wronged every time I buy a DVDR, a usb hard drive or key and so on. I use those to backup my own data (documents, photographs in raw+jpg, system backups..) and I feel sick to see even a cent of my money going to some random French singer I couldn't be bothered to care about. What little music I actually listen to (it's not a primary hobby for me) isn't even French. None of the money from the tax is ever going to the artists I do listen to from time to time.

Why should we subsidize a dying business anyway. Is this business that important to our daily lives ? I don't think so. Did they whine the same when modern technology destroyed other business practices or destroyed obsolete jobs, replaced by machines ? The music industry (the main whiner here) has existed for what, a century at most ? Let's just say it was a short-lived way to make a profit. People centuries ago didn't buy CDs or Vynils to listen to in their home. Is that business so essential to the world that we have to impose a tax on every citizen to sustain its existence ?

I'm not a pirate. I don't defend piracy. I just don't care for the music industry. It can completely disappear for all I care. There still will be music to listen to, just maybe not the drivel they're producing en masse.

That sounds like a horrible idea! "Hey you didn't get compensated for your work but don't worry the government now has a bit more money to spend on whatever it is they spend your money on"

Or is there some method in place to compensate people who's work has been downloaded (how do they track that?) in which case it would simply be better to cut out the middleman.

nice to see a few mentions of the real problem, which is not piracy, and criminalizing individuals, but the lack of legal affordable alternatives for consuming intellectual-property 'products'.

I don't know about tax as such, but can't see what's wrong with fees similar to ISP packages, or even the dreaded TV-license. With a fixed-fee (or perhaps a pro-rated fee based on income/social situation) you can get access to as much content as you'd like. As for the claim of that the link between creation and income is destroyed - I disagree. It should be quite easy to distribute the earnings fairly to artists based on usage patterns. In the days of analytics, click-counting, and measuring download bandwidth, it should be easy to see that one artist is much more popular than another, and hence deserves a bigger piece of the pie. It might not be 100% accurate, but I don't think the measurements now for sales and distribution are that accurate either.

This was the main reason why I wanted Sarkozy out. That and the fact that he created "e-g8" as a way to get even more countries to do the same. He was very dangerous for stuff like this.

Same here. However I'm a little worried about Hollande too, for completely different reasons though. But democracy these days always seems to be about picking the lesser evil. Quite a sad thought actually.

Btw: I'm not french, I'm just watching from a distance.

If you want to not vote for the lesser evil you need to implement a voting mechanism that doesn't devolve into binary decisions.

Even France's run-off election eventually boils down into a binary choice.

Wise organizations look into real electoral methods systems like Condorcet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method#Use_of_Condorc...

Condorcet is so '90s. The cool kids these days (including the German and Dutch Pirate Parties) are using transitively delegated voting systems like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiquidFeedback.

Lua and PL/SQL?!

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