
France will cut funding to its piracy police - iProject
http://paidcontent.org/2012/08/03/france-will-cut-funding-to-its-piracy-police/
======
Jacqued
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.

~~~
nakkiel
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.

~~~
Jacqued
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.

~~~
nakkiel
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.

~~~
Nicole060
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.

------
gingerlime
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.

------
mtgx
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.

~~~
tsahyt
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.

~~~
r00fus
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method#Use_of_Condorcet_voting)

~~~
waqf
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>.

~~~
nodata
Lua and PL/SQL?!

