RIAA is mulling over a piracy surcharge for ISPs, meaning that ISPs would have to pay, for example, 5 dollars per month for each person that shares music online. The collected money would be used for buying SUVs for RIAA managers go to the musicians.
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]Now, there's one or two things that are right about this proposal and at least dozen that are wrong. Personally I wouldn't mind that ISPs raise my monthly internet fees for a small amount (because that's how it would go down) if and only if it goes to the musicians. But, I don't like the fact that I'd have no choice in the matter, as this proposal talks about an obligatory, not voluntary surcharge. A voluntary fee that would let users freely share all their music without having to worry about being john-doe-sued by the music industry is not such a bad idea, although not without problems. But an obligatory fee would impact people who don't care about music at all, and it's just plain stupid to tax people for something they don't use.
But there are other issues. Who would control how this money will be spent? It's an awful idea to let a privately owned trade group create taxes and levies for their purpose and then use the money as they see fit. Furthermore, why would the music industry be the only one to benefit from such a tax? What about book publishers, software publishers, gaming industry, and all other industries which are somehow affected by file sharing? And even if you include them all, who decides how the money gets split between them? For example, if you're going to use those silly piracy damage numbers from the RIAA and the IFPI, you'd have to amass trillions of dollars to give everyone their share.
If you're interested in a local example of how such a model can go totally wrong, read on. In Croatia, a non-government organization (ZAMP) has been appointed by the government to collect a fee similar to the one described above, only not from ISPs, but from everyone that sells any sort of media on which music can be recorded - CDs, flash disks, memory cards - everything. However, this fee, which has been imposed on everyone that sells these, and therefore to all people that buy them, does not mean that you can freely copy music CDs or DVDs - it's still considered piracy. Now, you have a bizarre situation in which all people in a country must pay a fee which assumes they're all criminals, getting absolutely nothing in return, and you have a non-transparent group representing only one industry (musicians) collecting the money, dividing it as they see fit. Go figure.