Culture tax? Oh no way.
Slashdot reports that Warner Music Group has hired Jim Griffin to work out a deal with ISPs over file sharing. The proposal is to implement a monthly fee from ISPs to the big 5 record companies, to be absorbed by the internet consumer, in order to make file sharing music files completely legal. The price range is around US 20 billion per year to be split up among the ISPs. To put this in perspective, the global music sales market in 2004 was estimated at US 30 to 40 billion. That means, if sales continue along those lines (they probably will, buying the disc means higher quality sound, artwork, and hard copy storage etc.), the music industry will increase their profits overnight.
This in effect does two things: first it makes music into a service industry, and second, most importantly, this will be a privatized blanket culture tax. Of course, American critics of the deal are already complaining that this will be a culture tax. Funny, they don´t mind getting taxed to buy bombs, but culture, what? Europeans will absorb this concept, since they already deal with it, France has 1% for culture etc., but Americans?
I hope the long-tale theory will hold up if this blanket tax becomes reality. I don´t listen to much pop music, and there are many others like me. Perhaps the big music companies will increase spending in other less profitable sound projects with the idea that the combined niche markets will add up in the end.
The film industry will probably be the next to make deals with ISP´s and the consumers they have been vilifying until now.
But I don´t see any serious discussion about sampling, collage, appropriation and other forms of art work based on building on copyrighted culture. Since the future of these big industries depends on a fluid dialogue between new and old arts, it is in their own best interests to be reasonable. But since companies, boards, and elected officials are short sighted, motivated only by immediate profits, they will not probably deal with this soon.
In my adopted home, Norway, P2P has been half legal: it is legal to download because it falls under the personal copy rule, but it is illegal to upload because it falls under a rule against providing copyrighted material to the public. And regarding the legality of sampling and appropriation, Norway has a very interesting section 4 of their copyright law:
4
The author may not object to other persons using his scientific, literary or artistic work in such a manner that new and independent works are created. The copyright in the new and independent work shall not be subject to the copyright in the work that has been used.Any person who translates or adapts a literary, scientific or artistic work or converts it into another literary or artistic form shall have the copyright in the work in that form, but may not dispose of it in such a manner as to infringe the copyright in the original work.
It appears that sampling, appropriation and collage are in fact legal here. In draconian countries such as the USA, there is excitement and danger inherent in the gorilla tactics of artists, where the risk is real and the consequences are grave. (Insert cowboy image here.) Nothing generates spirited discourse more than opposition. In more reasonable countries such as in Scandinavia, one could generalize that life is boring and safe. Artist Sverre Gulleson and I had a conversation about his exhibition which he later named “Dandyland” after our conversation, because in the Nordic countries, artists and other dandies feign danger in order to spice things up, knowing full well that the danger is illusory: the national health systems will clean up all but the most serious incidents, free of charge.
But does that mean the Nordic people can get over their viking heritage, past tedious, petty, corporate behavior, and make a rational society in order to get down to the “important” stuff of life?
