Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Holland Thinking About Banning DRM and Legalizing File Sharing -- Implement Internet Tax Instead?

It looks like the Netherlands might be jumping on the "European DRM is teh SuX!" bandwagon by offering their own proposal to ban DRM. But here's the twist, lawmakers want to tax the general public for using the internet in order to compensate media companies, thus legalizing file sharing and free use of MP3's:

Martijn van Dam, a member of one of the bigger political parties in The Netherlands said, “Taxing Internet traffic is great way to compensate the Music Industry for the loss in sales by illegal filesharing”. He added that a prerequisite would be that DRM and copy protection should be abandoned. The battle against piracy is lost according to Van Dam, he says that the Music Industry has to accept that their products will be traded over the internet.

The article notes that, in the past, Holland had discussed the possibility of taxing MP3 players themselves to create a similar solution, but that the proposal was eventually dropped.

But would the general public support a law that taxed them for use of something they've managed to get for free just to promote compliance? I'm not sure how government works over in Holland, but this idea seems dead in the water to me.

Via torrentfreak

1 comment:

Karisma said...
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