Mike Arrington on the Music Tax
In the post, Replacing DRM with a Music Tax is Incredibly Stupid, Mike Arrington at TechCrunch offers his take on the Peter Jenner's Big Lables are f*cked, and DRM is Dead story in The Register a few weeks back. Mike argues:
But I do not think that the government should step in and help these people. I do not think that we should legislate a tax on broadband Internet access and mobile phones that gives the music industry guaranteed revenue, and guaranteed profits, while simultaneously removing their incentive to innovate and serve niche markets.
Asking the government to prop up a dying industry is always (always) a bad idea. In this case, it is a monumentally stupid, dangerous, and bad idea.
Mike makes some good points - but so does Peter Jenner - in the
end I think we all want a system where users can get easy access to
music, can share music to whomever, can listen to music on any device
anywhere, while the artists get fairly compensated for their work.
How to make that happen is the problem and finding the solution
is not going to be easy. I'm not sure if we'll find the solution
in my lifetime - sigh.