The problems with a flatrate system

There is a lot of talk from people on both sides of the copy fight about flatrate compensation systems.

Canadian songwriters has just proposed to “legalize” P2P with having a flatrate (mind you - P2P isn’t illegal, it just gives you the possibility to infringe on copyright, just like Internet as a whole does. And your friends if you go to their place and copy something). The Danish anti-pirates are also trying to convince the danish government to put a flatrate tax on each Internet connection - 100 DKK (about $15) a month - to legally download what ever music you want. We have the flatrate-supporters in Sweden as well.

Most people respond to the concept with ‘wow, that sounds like a sweet idea!’ and they stop there. But it has a lot of dangerous effects that we need to take in consideration.

The idea of “compensating” an industry is very short-sighted. What the record industry wants us to do is to give them money since their business model is not working anymore.
They want the governments to give them forced customers by law, that have to pay weather we like it or not. A state tax to give to the big companies, without them even having to work for it.
Record companies always say that there will be no quality music made if there’s no money to be made on record sales. They still want to have something as relaxed as a flat rate system where they would essentially get the same amount of money no matter what they produce (if anything). The only thing that it would lead to within the record business would be a lot of people fired to save money and gain even bigger profits.

Let’s go deeper into the idea and focus on the issues;

• There’s no way to say who transfered what song to whom on the Internet. It’s totally impossible both online and offline. So how would we monitor who would get the money?
• There’s no incentive to work for the money for the record companies. The artists will not gain anything from the companies since the whole idea of a company is to make as much money as possible while spending as little as possible.
• We will have to pay this tax even if we trade music made by people that release the music for free. And that’s the current trend, music is defacto free today, and most artists are seeing it as something good as well - the music is to be spread so they can make a name for themselves.
• We’re paying a tax to a system not needed anymore. The record industry is passé and we do not need nor want them anymore.
• The tax is currently only for music.. but what happens when the movie industry wants the same? Movies are more expensive and they would not be satisified by $10 a month. It would be an additional $50 maybe? Or more? Do people even spend that much today in general on media?
• And when the movie- and music industry have their share, what happens when the porn industry joins up? Porn makes up about 60-70% of the total P2P traffic. Do you want a tax that’s spent on porn? And do they not have the same rights as the rest of the industry when it comes to this, because it’s a bit more immoral?
• Why limit ourselves to just pay for the old traditional media? How about bloggers, how about software, how about pictures? They can also be copyrighted and spread using P2P systems. Or just read online. There’s more than the music and movie industry out there.

Flatrate might sound good but as long as it’s not voluntary and as long as the money is not divided by performance the concept is not the solution.