UK Proposes Broadband Expansion, Plus a Music and Film Tax

Wowsers writes "First the tech illiterates in the UK government want to extend broadband internet connections to every home, whether it makes sense or not, then at the same time they propose a £20 per year (approx $29US) broadband tax which they claim will pay the record and film industries for their failed business models. Coincidence the two proposals are linked? And why should people be forced to pay for the failed film and music industries?"

Failed?

The industries are hardly failed. Perhaps 'failing', but even failing might be too strong a word.

The 'failed' status is propaganda spread by those industries so that they don't have to change with the times. We shouldn't be reinforcing their marketing.

Questions and suggestion

How would that tax apply to, say, companies and people that just use the Internet for anything but pirated copy downloads?
How would that money be distributed? Worldwide? Europe? UK only?
I would finally prefer ISP to fine labels for poor content protection which causes network congestion and degradation!

So how can real artists collect our share?

I don't know if I'm more angry at the fact that I'm paying for the chancer who downloads movies and mp3s he wouldn't pay for anyway or for the fact only that certain oligopoly insiders will get their cut. The remainder who create content are ignored. (I'm not just talking about music and film, digital art has many forms including everything from fiction to high quality blogs, graphic arts, photography and source code)

Shame on the British Government for U.S. style pandering to the whiners in the MPAA and RIAA cartels.

Pay the bands, not the music industry

Music industry is not very useful in the age of internet. They have no added value. Why do a music-industry "Bail-out"???

Music industry, car industry (for cars with internal combustion) - it's all a bit obsolete.

To me this feels like doing a bailout for steam engine locomotives.

Old stuff just disappears. Accept it.

It Will Encourage Piracy

As typical of "our" "Government" this policy is ill-thought-out, completely out-of-touch with voter's opinions and as usual the "Government" listen to the wrong people.

1)A legal right to broadband in every home is *up to* 2Mb only. I know people who "technically" have broadband and *at best* up to 512Mb.

2) If a £20 "tax" were introduced, the piracy rate would increase because people will want to justify the increased cost - "If I have to pay the music publishers a levy even if I do not pirate thier music - I must as well start doing it then"

3) The "Government" & Music industry want to monitor our connections for illegal material (thankfully but idiotically only over P2P traffic). The early stages of monitoring ("because of crime and terrorism") our connections is already under way.

I know that many ISPs and other telecommunication companies have criticized the report this announcement was based on.

Intrestingly the European Human Rights act guarantees an individual's right to privacy - as far as I know the U.K. have not officailly signed-up to it yet.

Reiteration

This article is a bit mis-leading. Frighteningly, a more accurate account actually makes it sound even worse.

The government is planning to force ISPs to extend 2Mbps service to all locations with-in their domain.

The government also plans to force ISPs to "provide data about serial copyright-breakers to music and film companies..."

The government would create an agency to over-see this transfer of data about music/film copyright infringers, and the ISPs would flip the bill for the costs of operating this new agency.

Free Downloads For Life

So they charge everyone with broadband 20 quid to effectively allow them to legally download everything for free.

So no one will buy music/video again - they've already paid for it.

How will the money raised by this tax get distributed to the artists ?

Of course the answer is it won't. It will shore up the record companies, who will still bleat about people stealing music and use that as the excuse for the artists to get even further shafted.

Welcome to 21st Century Government - where the government's only purpose is to take your money from you and give it to whoever currently has their ear (and wallet).

I watched the industry shill on BBC News

I saw the shill from the music industry playing the "oh my god we are so poor and billions of pounds are being lost from file sharing" card. I was amazed he was able to say it with a straight face (although I guess he could believe his own shit).

He went on to say that this report (an interim report!) "didn't go far enough" to deal with the crippling online piracy that is causing music execs to have to bum for change on the streets.

And while he did mention "changing and adapting the business plan" to take advantage of the online era, the iTunes store was conspicuously absent (he did mention other services specifically by name, including Nokia's subscription service with their phones). So it's clear that the industry doesn't want to see iTunes succeed, even with their new tiered pricing deal. It seems that a runaway success download music store, with thousands of people buying tracks that "they could easily get for free" isn't worth mentioning in an interview about how the music industry is dealing with online downloading... How very.... selectively forgetful of them.

So, if any British music producer/record company/BMI researcher is reading, and I'm sure there must be some. Send another "-1 full of shit" moderation up the chain of command to the PR/management. Also, let them know that they'll never be able to stop online downloading, but it's not the end of days. Some simple reasons from the music buying public:

Sales of CDs are falling because:

1. Music just isn't as good as it used to be. Hours and hours of manufactured rubbish, heavily processed and canned and then carefully timed for release to score a number 1 is not music.

2. Even if some people like that type of music, and some must do, CDs and CD singles are *far* more expensive than they should be.

3. You prosecute grannies who don't own computers, and assign arbitrarily silly values of "lost revenue" to "stolen" songs. Hint: if people who wouldn't buy it if it cost money obtain it for free, you're not losing money.

4. 99.999999999999% of the profits of music sales do not go to the artists in question that we love. At least in the public perception. I'm sure it;s something like 3% of the price of a CD goes to the artist. Now, I understand basic economics, that everyone in the chain needs to be paid, from artist, vendor, distributor, manufacturer etc, but the labels are snarfing deep at the trough and fucking everyone else over. I'd rather download the music and just send the price of the CD to the band in the post, but that would be unfair to the company that pressed the CD and the shop that sold it.

5. I have bought from iTunes, quite a lot in fact. I wanted to show you guys that it was a viable business model, but you just won't let the subject go. Ignoring the success of the store and instead moaning that people still share music (well, duh!)

6. I seem to remember the movie industry proclaim that the sky was falling when the video cassette recorder hit the shops. That "home taping will kill movies! We'll lose BILLIONS! The World Is Over!!!!", but then they started selling their movies on VHS tape and made money hand over fist. Funny that. Oh, and just in case you were wondering, home taping *didn't* kill movies. They're still going strong. The really good movies that were released after VHS recorders were around made more money than the cocaine industry in the 80s.

7. You are never going to stop online music sharing. You just can not. Even getting it classified as a felony in the US (alongside rape, murder, grand larceny, grand theft auto, online music sharing is clearly as bad as those crimes) you will not stop it. Look to the software industry - Microsoft has almost more illegal copies of Windows out there than legit installs, yet they are still making hay while the sun shines. Would they prefer if everyone bought legit copies? Of course. Can then enforce this? No. Should they? Not really - people are always going to go outside the rules. Sell your product. Make it attractive to buy so that people will buy it.

People ultimately *will* purchase a product they can get for free if they perceive the cost as worth it, so this is down to quality, time, and convenience. If the value for money is good enough, they will buy it. However, you won;t get *everyone* in on this. There will still be people who won't buy, no mater how cheap. Let them go and focus on your paying customer base and how you can make them happy. DRM-free is a good start.

Also, don;t pretend anything other than the reality that Apple dragged you kicking and screaming into the online music business. If there was no iTunes music store in the beginning, there would be no online music download stores right now. You'd still be sitting in your 80 storey glass skyscrapers moaning about how online file sharing is costing you billions.

Treat us like criminals?

I acquire all my music/films/software legally.

If I'm going to be taxed on the assumption that I'm illegally downloading stuff, then I guess I might as well go ahead and start getting pirated versions instead.

If you punish people for things they haven't actually done, expect them to go off and start doing it.

Compensate the Post Office

If we are to give money to the music industry because the Internet is making their business out of date, then surely we ought to also compensate:

• The post office - people send each other documents/letters by email
• The phone company - VOIP is starting to erode their profits
• The air lines and rail companies - corporations increasingly hold meetings by teleconference
• Publishers of porn magasines - people get their porn over the Internet these days

There should be an additional tariff on visitors to wikipedia, encyclopedia publishers are seeing a drop in sales.

I could go on.

Re:Not a bad thing

If the tax REALLY meant that we were free to download whatever we wanted, and the RIAA / MPAA extortion tax had already been paid, we could do away with all the ISP torrent throttling / shaping, and all the frivolous lawsuits (which lets face it, we pay for anyway in terms of other taxes).

Read TFA - its nothing as "fair" as directly compensating the industry for "lost" revenue: the proposed tax would fund a new agency which would (muffled buzzing and mumbling) between the entertainment industry and ISPs.

Re:Not a bad thing

That's not a cure.

That's "stop them stealing, funding criminal networks and needlessly killing themselves by injecting god-knows-what they just bought".

Big difference.

Re:Not a bad thing

I just gave myself a great idea!

Much like heroin, we give them this tax money and in return they make their entire catalogue available to us in high quality from a reputable source (i.e. them).

That's what we're proposing right? Right?

Oh, no, wait, we're proposing that they get their money and we get... fuck all.

Re:Not a bad thing

I guess that's pretty much what is happening with the financial crisis going on:

1. You tax the people.
2. You give the tax to the (almost bankrupt) banks.
3. The banks use the money to pay each other huge bonuses, whilst still refusing to make any loans.

Fixed that for ya.

But that isn't the case.

The tax is to pay for a new government department that will aid lawsuits file sharers and hold anonymised information that can be used to identify repeat infringers.

And yes, I know anonymised information to identify people makes no fucking sense, but that's how the report phrased it. I'm still trying to figure out how it can be both anonymous and used to identify too.

I've not only read TFA but I've read the actual interim report too and the whole thing was simply non-sensical. If you read the section on copyrights etc. the first few pages are really quite good- they make comments along the lines of "We realise file sharing is something that's widely done and widely accepted and that people have come to accept. It is clear therefore that in this case it is perhaps the laws and business models that need to change". But then after the first few pages the mood changes completely and they outright contradict statements such as the above by mentioning they intend to introduce a new department and so on to protect failing business models and not change the laws.

I find this particularly interesting because they've clearly put it into the report to make it sound like they care about the other side of the argument, but more importantly- it shows they understand the problem in it's entirety. If they understand it but are contradicting their understanding of it anyway then frankly there's only one possible explanation I can come up with for this obscure situation- corruption. I can simply see no other reason why they'd accept they're fighting the unfightable but going to do it and appease the music and movie industry anyway.

Some of snippets that were interesting were statements that the UK is the world's biggest exporter of culture. That seems rather unlikely to me, certainly compared to the US' McDonalds, Hollywood, RIAA affiliated companies etc. I can't see that we come close.

The only upside of the report I can see is that they have at least done away with the idea of three strikes and intend to follow the lawsuits based approach. This is good because unless the UK courts are equally corrupt as Lord Carter clearly is then this should be shown up to be a massive waste of money. The RIAA's evidence doesn't stand up in court at the end of the day because there is still no way to attach file sharing to a particular person (only to a particular IP) other than literally sitting looking over their shoulder and watching them do it.

The irony of the proposed tax is that it's actually worse for everyone than if it were a tax to legalise P2P. If it were for that then more people would be happier, the music industry would be netting in a small fortune, file sharers would be paying a not unreasonable amount. The people who would lose out are those who don't file share but still have to pay the tax. As it stands though the proposed solution only gives the music industry a load more unwinnable cases, the tax payer is funding another ultimately useless government department and ISPs have to bear the cost of dealing with the situation.

The final report is still to come, and hopefully MPs will realise the idiocy behind all this. Certainly the Conservatives seem to realise the idiocy of a tax-based approach, even if they as a party support prevention of file sharing through equally unworkable methods. The problem is of course, Labour can do what they want, and if they crack the whip it doesn't matter what the other parties want, it doesn't matter what the MPs themselves want, all that matters is what the Labour niche- Brown, Burnham, Carter and probably Smith want.

Oh and before I forget.

The report also kills off any hope of seeing net neutrality laws in the UK under a labour government. Not only have they said they don't want laws for net neutrality, they've outright said they believe it's the wrong thing to do and that ISPs should be able to pick and choose what to transfer, for who and at what cost.

This was supposed to be a report for the UK's digital future but coupled with this, my above post and the fact they're referring to things like DRM that even the music industry now accepts is a failure as solutions to piracy then it sounds more like a report for a draconian broadband dark age.

Nothing in this report bar the idea of universal broadband access can help the UK's technology sector. Despite accepting that it's worth £50bn they've put what they also accepted was only worth about £3bn - the creative industries above it. This report is out and out going to destroy any chance of the UK ever catching up to the world technology leaders if the actions included are carried out. Again, the fact Carter can put a £3bn industry above a £50bn industry suggests Carter is corrupt to the core and is putting his personal agenda above the health of the country's economy. Just as Labour gutted the UK's science research, they're now gutting the rest of the technology futures in the UK.

Re:But that isn't the case.

The present UK government is mostly driven by doing "favours" to their friends in business. So this report will have been created by splicing together two different documents: one (originally written by the ISPs) describing a scheme for the government to give tax money to the ISPs under the pretext of "broadband for all", and the other (originally written by the record companies) describing a scheme for the government to give tax money to the record companies under the pretext of "doing something about copyright infringement". That would explain the sudden change of tone in the middle of the document.

Re:Not a bad thing

we could do away with all the ISP torrent throttling / shaping, and all the frivolous lawsuits (which lets face it, we pay for anyway in terms of other taxes).

You don't need money for that. You need legislation.

Just make fair use cover p2p for personal use.

That's what Hungary does, and it works great.

Re:Not a bad thing

Virgin Media supposedly just tried to set up a legal filesharing system for subscribers. Everything was apparently going well until the last minute, when Sony & Universal decided they liked everything about the plan except the actual 'sharing files' aspect:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/23/virgin_puts_legal_p2p_on_ice [theregister.co.uk]

Confused summary

I know that in the UK they have a TV tax that is used to fund the BBC and such things, but with the TV tax you at least know that they are watching TV shows and at the time they instituted the tax BBC was I think the only or at least the biggest player. Now with sky and other channels there's more people that should be getting that money(I dunno if they do or if they are terrestrial or what)

The BBC is funded by a direct tax on households with television. It carries no (overt) advertising and therefore is able to provide programmes without reference to the Rupert Murdoch world-view, unlike Sky. Sky should definitely not receive any taxpayer subvention as it exists to promote the views of an Australian/American billionaire, like its US counterpart Fox News.

I am afraid that this latest proposal is nothing to do with the BBC model, it is all about keeping foreign recording companies in the country and onside. Which is about continuing to try to keep the City of London at a level of importance disproportionate to the country as a whole. Just about every plan we hear nowadays is about taxing the rest of us to, ultimately, keep bankers in bonuses.

"T.V.tax"

It works like this. Everyone in the UK who owns a T.V. has to buy a licence for £131.50 ($187.2). The money raised all goes to fund the BBC, which is "non-commercial" ie no ads etc. This covers the cost of some 7 TV channels and numerous national and local radio channels, as well as the BBCi online services. The BBC also gains revenue from sales of it's programmes abroad, and from a commercial merchandising arm. None of the licence fee goes to any other broadcaster. ITV, Channel Four, Channel Five, B-Sky-B (Sky) and Vigin media are all commercial operations and depend on advertising revenue etc for their income.
Having said all that, I don't see that this is relevent to a "Broadband Tax" at all. This is just another misguided nonsense from this misguided and non-sensical govenrment that we Brits are currently enduring.

Re:Is this surprising?

No, the BBC is funded by taxing everyone in the UK who has a equipment that they use to watches or records TV signals as they are shown [tvlicensing.co.uk].

The difference is that the TV License has a benefit (it lets you have a TV, it funds an organisation that provides the only watchable TV channel, and it funds some decent UK shows that aren't complete drivel* and which are an hour long if they are scheduled for an hour, rather than being 40 minutes long in an hour long slot) while the broadband tax will be levied on people to cover the illegal actions of others even if the person being taxed isn't doing anything illegal themselves.

.

* Channel 4 has "Big Brother", BBC produces things like QI. If I had to specifically decide which my license fee went to and which producers had to be locked away for eternity for crimes against TV and sanity, the Big Brother people would definitely have to be the ones locked in the Big Brother house along with the mindless contestants of each series they've made so far.

tv license != tax

I'd just like to say that I don't think the TV license should be called a tax; even if it's virtually equivalent to one.

Taxes are collected and administered by the Government. TV license fees are not.
There's a good and important reason for that: To keep public television free of governmental/political interference.

Calling the TV license a tax, as well as referring to the BBC and other (west-)European public TV companies as 'government-owned' and similar gives the inaccurate picture that they're under some kind of direct government control, which they are not.

Re:Amazon/Play/HMV/iTunes

This £20/year tax isn't going to suddenly make it legal to engage in filesharing - it'll just pay for a government department (or, more likely, a quango) to prosecute you for doing so.

So not only is it still illegal to share files, you're also paying for the privilege of being prosecuted for it.

Re:Uhm..

"Why should I pay for some deadbeats who should be punished instead of being rewarded for their actions."

Yeah, that's how I feel about the music industry too.

Oh, wait, what? You were talking about consumers??? So which one do you work for then, Sony BMG? Universal?