Finnish taxi drivers have to pay a levy to their country’s recording industry for playing music in their car. (And no, it doesn’t matter if they record their own music). Two churches are in court for singing Christmas hymns. A musician gets sued for plagiarizing absolute silence.
With my hundreds of CDRs and CDRWs, I haven’t pirated a single CD, but at least 1/3 of what I pay for them is tax to supposedly account for it.
DVDs are region encoded, preventing me from purchasing that hilarious UK comedy series I want to buy, or that awesome Japanese anime series. I can’t seriously think of a reason why they should be, and I can’t even recall the bullshit reason the RIAA gives.
A CD plus jewelcase plus art takes at most $3 to make in bulk, and I’m being generous with the overhead there. I’ve heard of many musicians claiming they make pennies per sale. Why does it cost $22 Canadian for me to legally enjoy an hour of music?
Orson Welles, Ray Bradbury, big companies have perfected the fucking-over way better than governments ever could. Care to revise your manuscripts?
I’ve always maintained that I would be happy to pay those pennies per song directly to the artist. Heck, even time I play it, even. But cut out that bloated neo-mafia dinosaur acting as the middleman.
I don’t have many qualms about downloading music, in case you wondered. I’ll set aside a couple of bucks for the day that an efficient payment mechanism is finally devised, and I can make sure the artists get my money and not some corporate wonk.
If you have a good DVD player, the region shit is easily defeated.
Or, if you can’t defeat it on your player, you could always use your PC to rip the DVD and burn it as an SVCD and play that on your DVD palyer.
