TAXING BLANK RECORDABLE MEDIA

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Most big businesses write off shoplifting as a cost of doing business. The recording industry, by contrast, hopes to shore up its bottom line by adding a tax on all types of blank recordable media, such as cassette tapes, CDs, flash memory cards, and even ordinary floppy disks. The theory is that because pirates must use blank recordable media to steal copyrighted works, a tax on recordable media can at least partially compensate companies for the revenue they lose due to piracy. (Technically, this additional fee isn’t a “tax” because it’s not being collected by a government agency but by a recording industry representative, so it’s a “levy.” Either way, it’s an additional cost to the consumer.)

Unfortunately, adding a tax (or “levy”) to every type of blank recordable media punishes both the pirate and the law-abiding user who never records any type of music. A levy on blank recordable media is like having the police give everyone a speeding ticket for driving down a certain road whether they were speeding or not.

Forcing consumers of blank recordable media to pay extra may monetarily compensate the recording industry, but it still does nothing to address the main problem of people copying files across peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. If levies can be collected on recordable media, does that give people the right to then make copies of copyrighted files? If someone doesn’t record copyrighted files, how come they can’t get a refund on a levy that shouldn’t affect them? From an artist’s point of view, how much money does the recording industry collect through levies, and how much of that actually gets transferred to the artists, whose works are being copied in the first place? And who decides how it gets distributed?

Obviously levies by themselves won’t stop file sharing, but they represent one more tactic the entertainment industry hopes can stem the revenue losses they blame on illegal file sharing.

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