France Wastes Potential with Wrong Reasons and Incorrect Approach
There may be some potential to Sarkozy’s proposal to tax major Internet advertising companies in order to raise money to support creative industries, if done for the right reasons and approached from the correct angle. Unfortunately, the reasons are all wrong and the approach is incorrect, so it’s simply yet another attempt to support industries that no longer have a real place in today’s world and help a select few hold on to the vast wealth they’ve been acquiring by exploiting others’ work for so long. Plus, more than likely, it’s yet another method of cultural protectionism and possibly also isolationsim, which is pretty much what you’d expect from France.
But something could be achieved by selecting the few good parts of this proposal, improving them and then implementing them correctly and for the right reasons. And by “good parts” I mean redirecting a part of the advertising revenue generated by people accessing certain types of content on-line to the creators of said content and creating a system through which people without credit cards will be able to easily send money to content creators. Sure, the proposal doesn’t exactly specify those things either, but it contains concepts that could be improved in order to become what I said in the previous phrase.
To go into more detail, I believe I mentioned the first idea at least once before. It can certainly be argued that a company that earns advertising revenue as a result of people viewing a page that contains content created by someone else is making money off others’ work, so a significant portion of that revenue ought to be directed towards the creators of said content. This is very different from the idea listed in the proposal, which would involve a tax on all advertising revenue generated by certain companies which would then be directed towards certain industries as a whole.
This method seems to me to benefit both users and content creators, because users would no longer face penalties for posting songs or movies or books or other such works on these sites and the authors would earn some money as a result of people listening to or watching or reading their works. It also seems very fair, since currently these sites do earn money from such content, albeit indirectly, but the authors earn nothing and the users who make the effort to upload the content are even liable for punishments for doing so. But all of this is only valid as long as the revenue would be directed straight towards the authors and nobody else…
As for the second idea, it’s an integral part of my concept of the Content Creators’ Association. In fact, it’s the most important part of that concept from the point of view of the potential customers. And providing a means for people to pay content creators after purchasing prepaid cards is one of the solutions I’m most interested in, because if implemented properly it’d allow people to make use of any shop they have access to, whether traditional or on-line, to charge an on-line account from which they could then make payments or donations towards any content creator of their choosing, for any product of their choosing or even for no specific product at all, without being restricted by the offers of the shops they have access to or by the payment methods at their disposal.
That concept of mine includes many more ideas, but this is what the users of such content would notice most, because it’d make it much more convenient to make such purchases or simply show your appreciation for a certain content creator. But, once again, all of it relies on the fact that any payments will be made directly to the content creators, so people will stop supporting an industry that’s unfair to begin with and certainly no longer has a place in the digital age.
So now we come to the general issue of the industry in question, which is made up of content creators who, with the exception of the select few who happen to benefit from great marketing campaigns, are paid far less than their work is worth and distributors who earn huge amounts of money off the work of said content creators and pull strings to silence anyone who tries to change the rules of the game, be they regular people who power file-sharing networks or companies who come up with potentially new ways to distribute such content, bridging the gap between the authors and the consumers by getting rid of the current distribution model. And proposals like this, in its current form, serve only to prove that point, seeing as they’re obviously the result of powerful distribution companies pulling strings and greasing the right palms in order to have their desires turned into laws.
But that only means we have some more clear targets to destroy in the battle for fairness on this front. I can only hope that more and more content creators will join the fight on this side of the barricades, breaking this alliance with the distributors which harms them about as much as it harms the consumers more often than not. I’m saying that because, while the fight is against the distributors and I certainly have nothing against content creators, we can’t afford protecting anyone who keeps supporting the enemy anymore. The world would be much poorer and all of this would be useless without content creators, but we need to work together if we are to get anything done. Otherwise, the distributors will win and everyone else will lose greatly.
I think the fact that these issues are being discussed at such high levels from the first days of the year only serves to prove what I was saying, namely that 2010 is likely to be a crucial year in this fight between file-sharers and others who desire a different business model when it comes to creative content and the distributors who desperately try to cling on to the old ways that benefit them so greatly.
