places in Europe doing this, based on the statistics that showed that most
blank media was bought to make copies of copyrighted materials, and not of
Tante Ellen giving the family history, but as far as I knew, we weren't
doing that here yet.
And I have to admit, there is a certain amount of logic to it. I know that
90% of the blank cassette tapes I bought from 1969 to 1999 were specifically
for making what we now call "mix tapes" of my records. Similarly, about 90%
of the blank VHS tapes I bought were for timeshifting TV shows. It made a
lot of sense to me that rather than trying to sue us all into oblivion for
copyright infringement, they just add another 5c to the cost of blank media,
and make sure that goes to all of the proper rights organizations. When I
first suggested this to some other people I knew, the one or two people in
the group who *never* bought tapes to copy music or TV shows onto (probably
the only two people in the *world*) complained that it would be making them
pay for something they never did.
When I similarly suggested that the movie industry just tack an additional
dollar onto the price of videos to cover the "non-theatrical" rights, so
that your kid could take a movie to school or daycare without having the
place run afoul of the "public performance" clause, these same two people
complained that it wouldn't be fair because they never sent stuff in with
their kids.
The simple fact of the matter is that the amount of paperwork we have to go
through in order to make sure that each of the stakeholders gets their
perceived correct slice of the pie is way too much, and the rules are
totally counter-intuitive. We need to streamline the whole copyright and
public performance thing.
On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 2:13 PM, George Cohen <gcohen@thewalkerschool.org>
wrote:
> What really gets my goat is that every blank cd or tape or anything
> recordable has a fee added to the cost to cover the copyright fees. This
> was added in the 70's when the discussion was about recording songs off of
> the radio. I don't beleive they have removed that charge. (If someone
> knows for sure that it was removed, I'll take back my rant)
>
> So your paying for the right to copyright something that they say you
> can't copy.
>
> Sounds a lot like taxation without representation to me.
>
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