Tax the customers buying CDs and DVDs! Because you know they're going to rip them and upload them, right? So grab the money off the thieving scoundrels up front! That'll teach 'em to go buying our precious Intellectual Property!

why dont they stop charging rip off prices for media? maybe that would reduce piracy?
in china, genuine movies and music sells for much less because the industries understand that the price influences sales.
but in the uk, the government will impose taxes or criminalise its citizens to support the private profiteers of the media industries so why should they bother to lower the price?
as usual, the little guys suffers and the fatcats grow fatter.
....care for a directorship when you retire minister?

So will this mean I would have already paid for all the content I wish for and hence no longer be considered a pirate?

You might love paying £200 to download Movies and Music to your hearts content. Fine. If you get the opportunity, go for it. But there are plenty of people (like me) who aren't interested. I last paid a TV licence fee about 20 years ago. My wife pays it now because she watches it - I'd let it lapse in an instant if anything should happen to her. I never buy albums (I don't listen to that sort of music), instead I usually go to concerts - where I'm on the platform, more often than not, actually. The reason the music industry is in such a pickle is there are a LOT of people, like me, who just don't see ANY value WHATSOEVER in their offerings. Don't make US pay for it just because you do. Cheers,
Wol

mesh networking. What then - ban computers?

So the government is now an enforcer for companies? A service for allowing companies to charge people for content?

If enough people walk on a piece of land enough doesn't it become a public path? Surely 6 million people would be enough for the government to say downloading is not illegal - if people are doing this then the Music Industry is not pricing themselves properly.

Give me a yearly subscription charge for Movies and Music (£200 a year?) and I'll pay it no problem. Would love that to be honest!

What a putz! I wonder how much Lord Carter is trousering from the ISP's and the media companies to put this idea forward? Let's face it, the media companies waste huge money on their overpaid marketing managers. The argument that they are losing money and that they need our dosh via taxes is absurd and insulting. They should run this guy off.

One way or the other, the TV licence is on its way out. It may take abother 10-20 years but eventually it will go.

But that's not going to stop them charging one, it's just that they'll have to reinvent it to cover all forms of delivery and share the money with other broadcasters and maybe even the ISPs to subsidise their increased bandwidth costs.

The fact that the BBC have been so eager to get all its TV channels sreamed live over the Internet (now including BBC One & Two) when the iPlayer is already an adequate solution suggests to me it's a strategic move to force Internet connections be coverable by the TV licence because it's a live stream, with the long term goal being the claim that having broadband is the same as having TV reception equipment and this is why the licence should continue.

Better still, there's the potential to gat rid of the annual bill sent to homes and make the ISP take the money instead. Unlike the current system, which is open to evasion, if you don't pay your ISP, you don't get any TV. Simple.

I think it's inevitable that we'll one day see the TV licence morph into an Internet licence or 'service charge'. The Broadband tax will start at £20 but inch upwards, and when the time comes to scrap the TV licence it's soon rocket so that we end up paying more than the old charges combined.

All those people who moan about the TV licence really should stop for a moment and think things through because the only things we're only ever going to get is truely awful straight-to-air TV like America, where you have 7 minutes of product placement followed by 5 minutes of adverts. if you want HBO or something else better than FTA, you'll have to pay - a lot - for it.

Or, it'll all be subscription, so by the time you pay your monthly £20 to the BBC, another £20 to ITV, £15 for whatever group Channel 4 ends up being the primary channel of along with the other Freeview channels, you'll end up paying considerably more than £137.50. And you'll have to put up with adverts on the comemrcial BBC.

Be careful for what you wish, you might actually get it.

Is this not just another knee-jerk reaction from this pathetic government of incompetents and losers? The business environment is changing, the part of the music industry that adapts to the 21st century will survive, the rest will die a natural death, as it should. British history shows us repeatedly that it is a waste of tax payer's money in the long term to prop up bad business. For decades radio and TV in the UK was crippled by over regulation and state monopolies. If Carter and co have their way the Internet will be regulated and taxed into the same level of stasis as was Radio and TV in the 40's and 50's. Sadly there is a high degree of "control freakery" nestling in the breasts of British politicians.

If this tax comes in I will never purchase another Blu-ray / DVD /CD and just download them...... what a crazy suggestion, totaly out of touch and on another planet!

What they need to do is lower the cost of such things, so a blu-ray is not £20 but £10

Just another stealth tax if you ask me.

Greg, You are already paying for 'collection and recycling' when you buy your plasma TV. It is required by the WEEE directive, although not a gov't tax as such, companies have to be able to prove they have paid for it. Mobile phones too, you have paid the gov't for the spectrum.

There is nothing wrong with taxes in principle to change the behaviour of consumers or businesses, but provided that the system improves society, reduces resource usage, improves efficiency etc. Unfortunately allot of gov't policy is aimed at short term economic benefit for business.

the music industry doesn't need to wake up, it needs to roll over and die, it's not needed anymore we have new ways of doing things that don't involve useless middlemen charging extortionate fees for doing nothing, let the artists sell their wares directly to the public for a much lower fee. As for this useless sack of shit government, if they had any faith whatsoever in their own policies they'd have called an election to legitimise themselves, they're just keeping their noses in the trough for aslong as they possibly can.

This is another nail in the coffin for one of the most hated governments Britain has ever seen. They seem to be actively trying to find ways to convince voters to vote for another party in the next election. I first noticed this tendency about a year ago and since then they have done everything to prove my hypothesis.

What music industry...it was all destroyed by the C30-C60-C-nine-Oh generation. Which reminds me...are we still paying a levy on blank cassettes?

Copying has always occurred, whether it was recording from the radio, copying CDs or downloads. It is an age old right for those who didn't have 2 digit pocket money as kids. The record industry calls this a loss, but the music would not have been bought in the first place.

I agree some people who can afford it will take the piss, but mainly because it is so expensive in the first place. Media companies throw money around like its nothing, its about time they joined the rest of the world and controlled their expenditure. Most of a CDs cost goes to marketing, that doesn't make any sense, except 'jobs for the boys'.

They need to wake up and introduce a new fairer business model, where copying is traceable (not prevented) and you can share it with to up to 5 friends for example. Make the cost more trivial and you have a working system were people couldn't be bothered to copy illegally.

Looks to me like this might be another case of an official taking cash to pass new legislation!

Though on the other side it sounds like a great idea, just another reason for britain to get rid of the crumbling and totally inefective government, you know the one, plundering our bank accounts with massive amounts of debt to pay for a false ecconomy, based on credit.

Id say 75% of people with fast connections now will downgrade anyway if it becomes too dodgy to use p2p who wants to pay 35 a month to read mails and watch you tube, so who the feck will neeed these 50mb connections.
Virgin et al will shoot themselves in the foot and end up with a product no one wants or needs.

A fucking scooby doo... At some point at some distant point in the future we can only dream that a government will appoint someone to a position of control over something in which they actually have some fucking experience and or knowledge.

Efros

It's perfect really isn't it? "Tech Taxes" are an excellent way to claw back public money as the economy turns to mush. £20 is something people with Broadband are simply going to pay. So what's next? a £20 tax on using a mobile phone? Perhaps a tax on the use of plasma screen TV's to cover their disposal later?

Alternatively, how about a tax on the media for broadcasting "Doom & Gloom"? Surely that has cost us more as a nation than the downloading of music files!

Lord Carter needs a reality check! This is just another money making plan for the government. A government that has shown how unreliable in the field of IT it is!! The broadband companies are getting too much money as it is.

some have estimated that 6 million people download thats 6 million votes. actually its prob more than that.
Also if everybody has paid out upfront those 6 million will want their monies worth.
The figures quoted by the music industry assume that downloaders would pay if they couldn't download not true.
We will find another way to break the thieving companies