“Companies that make these tablets must, in a minor way, be made to contribute part of the revenue from their sales to help creators.”
Okay, let’s set aside for a moment everything that is wrong with the idea that the state should funds the arts and just look at that sentence. Aurelie Filipetti is missing the great big elephant in the room, here. Tablet makers don’t pay taxes, the buying public do. All that will happen is that the tablet makers will collect the tax on behalf of the French government – they won’t be paying any tax, the people who buy the kit will be doing that. And, look closely, very closely at that sentence, for there is socialism in a microcosm – “be made to… That’s right, we – or, that is, the French – will be forced to part with money to support arts that they would otherwise not choose to fund.
There is a word for this and that word is stealing. Because that is what socialists do – steal other peoples money and give it to their friends.
Also in the article:
“The bid is based on France’s so-called “cultural exception” policy, which aims to protect culture from market forces and foreign competition”
In other words, the little people aren’t smart enough to know what’s good for them.
I’m not wearing my glasses; I misread that quote as ‘France’s so-called ‘cultural excretion policy” and thought for one delightful moment that they had found the perfect phrase for what the establishment so frequently does to the general public from a great height.
Because socialists always know what’s best for other people.
The audio CD was nearly stillborn. The reason was because the bulk of the ‘software’ was controlled by American ‘record’ companies. Philips, the originator of the CD, wanted to charge a fee of 1 cent per disc, discs that were selling for over $10.
The CD is an incredible piece of technology. A plastic disc needs to be accurately moulded and metallised to reproduce a microscopic pattern of pits. These pits are detected by using a laser diode, a triumph of solid-state fabrication, kept on track by sophisticated control electronics. The recovered data stream is decoded by complex digital systems using advanced mathematical algorithms to produce a high-quality audio output. The whole package has been ‘value engineered’ (yuk!) to the extent that the cost of a CD drive has fallen forty-fold in money terms in thirty years. Consider then the sheer expertise needed to achieve this. Consider then that the people doing this work, engineers and mathematicians, were paid good but not great salaries. Consider that they invariably signed away all rights of their inventions to their employer and that other than their salary they have had no other benefit.
Meanwhile the ‘record; company produces the CD for $1, the retailer takes $5, leaving a clear profit of $4 of which at least 10 cents goes to the recording ‘artiste’. And they couldn’t ‘spare’ Philips one cent! And of course, like all such artistic works, the copyright extends for 75 years after the death of the performer and merely needs to be asserted (i.e. costs nothing) while the ‘rights’ to the CD technology needed to be carefully described and patented at high cost around the world and even then probably expired after 10 years! The fact that the copyright work might only consist of three words that came to someone in a drunken stupor, but is worth millions must be hard to bear if you were one of the engineers or mathematicians involved in the original research.
On another topic: I know you don’t like bans but when you see, as I did today, a toddler working his way through a packet of Jaffa Cakes you might have cause to think again!