• The Pirate Tax—Anything to Shut Them Up!
  • Continued

I'm not sure how many people even remember audiocassettes. They are still the best medium for long audio books and for recording music easily. In fact, during their heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, audiocassettes were used to copy so much music that a pirate tax was levied on every blank cassette sold, with few users realizing it.

DAT cassettes were similarly taxed in an extremely complicated scheme outlined in the Congressional Audio Home Recording Act of 1992. This was after so much bickering that the DAT cassette never managed to become successful among consumers. Who says that our Congress doesn't work directly for Hollywood?

I cannot personally make heads or tails of the act, the royalty structure, or anything in between, but I reckon payments are made and now nobody is complaining. And we already know that analog audio cassettes were taxed too. In Canada they tax blank CDs. There the tax is called a levy, since it doesn't benefit the government and is done at the behest of Hollywood. The current levy is 21 cents per CD-R. They also levy a flat $25 on any hard disk in an MP3 player for the same reasons. (This Web site follows that process: http://neil.eton.ca/copylevy.shtml.) There seems to me to be some element of racketeering here, but who is going to do anything about it if the government is in bed with the racketeers?

That said, I'd like to know if it would shut them (RIAA, MPAA) up if we implemented these sorts of levies on blank media and MP3 devices in the U.S.? We've already done it with cassettes, and nobody seemed to complain about it. Would it mean that the music and movie moguls would go after real pirates in Southeast Asia rather than some kids in Texas?

Maybe we should ask them if it would be enough to just give them money regardless of whether we even listened to music, let alone made copies. It's hard to get accurate sales figures on CD-Rs, but the billion-disc market first appeared in 2000 and was doubling every year. So a conservative guess at five billion blank discs seems reasonable. If a 20-cent levy is added to the discs, that would be a cool billion dollars to be dropped into the already bulging coffers of Hollywood's entertainment industry. Would a billion dollars a year shut them up?—Continue reading>