Alternative compensation system

The cultural flat rate is a concept for a flat tax, which is to be distributed to rights holders of digital content. In return for the public dissemination of digital copies, for example in file sharing networks are for private use, legalized. To implement the ( German ) Copyright Act should be amended. This concerns in particular to digital content that are consumed, such as images, texts, games and movies. Enterprise software is not usually belongs to such cultural goods.

Background

The availability of the Internet and the possibility of low-loss data compression, it has become customary to digital content - such as music, movies, newspapers, magazines, books, pictures - to swap between users who are mostly in no personal relationship. These are under the copyright law to an action that requires the consent of the owner, and without such consent is unlawful. This increases the duplicators and distributors liable to prosecution and cause revenue loss to the rights holder if the consumer would have bought the copyrighted products otherwise.

Here it is also the idea in the course of movements campaigning for Internet freedom that this swap was not to prevent technical reasons like no preventable anonymization techniques on the Internet. For preventing a more or less total surveillance would have to be introduced. As a logical consequence is therefore sought alternative concepts of copyright, to ensure factory- meaning people a fair pay.

Another argument for the cultural flat rate is the artificial scarcity of intangible assets, which arises by copyright. Against this argument, however, says that providers like Juke or Napster for consumers already the Kulturflatrate make similar deals, so that consumers barely notice an artificial shortage.

The idea of ​​a cultural flat rate is now, on the one hand to legalize these commonplace held copying actions and secondly to charge a fee, which will be distributed to rights holders - as compensation for the use of their works.

This is based on the principle of private copying and the associated lump-sum amount. This is levied in Germany since the 1960s: So on blank cassettes, CD and DVD media, and to the corresponding recorder a fixed levy to be paid.

The result is the idea of ​​culture flat rate on the basis of criticism of the currently popular DRM practice and the associated user control. In this, the consumer can download works from a legal provider, but is prevented by technical measures on the non-desired by the rights holder proliferation, but also to the legitimate uses and create a private copy. Considerations of organizations such as the TCPA or its successor to the Trusted Computing Group also went there to make computer against copy protection circumvention immune. On the other hand, put DRM systems such as marlin it to be compatible with as many devices and also to allow private copying. DRM could also be useful for a culture flat rate because DRM systems enable monitoring by reliable statistics about the usage behavior. However, DRM systems would at a legalization of file sharing of culture media can not grasp, and so contradict the concept of culture flat-rate basic.

Concept of implementation

The sum of all amounts paid from the flat delivery of the culture flat rate is then distributed to the owners. Basis of this distribution could be the number of times the respective work is used. This could be approximated collected via download numbers or the observation of a sample of the population. Proponents of the culture flatrate expect one, compared to the current data collection by GEMA, more accurate and thus more equitable distribution is made possible by this simple and detailed recording. To make the system even for the other side, the user -friendly, there is the idea of ​​staggering the contribution depending on the speed of online access and type of settlement divide (time rate / volume rate / flat rate).

Compulsory levy

The main criticism of this model is the obligation of all users of broadband access to pay this tax, even if they want to receive any protected content. In some cases, however, exist even today levies in favor of GEMA, about the purchase of blank media such as CD's that can be dropped with the introduction of a culture flat rate.

Fraud risk

Critics in the determination of the distribution key also a risk of fraud by means of manipulated statistics - just anonymous methods are vulnerable to a distortion of the image of consumer behavior, for example through mass downloads of own content or strong advertising of files, which then obviously contain unusable material, just to get by the clicks to get money. There is no technical solution that could ensure anonymity and security fraud.

The problem of manipulation exists even in the traditional model, for example, fake CD - bulk purchases; at a Kulturflatrate the phenomenon, however, would not be limited to large record companies / publishers but almost every private person would be able to manipulate the system.

Administrative expenses

Another aspect is the large administrative burden: thus a reasonably equitable distribution would be possible for a very large data base would need to be collected to then be allocated proportionally to pass the money to the artists. Approaches for obtaining such statistics currently offer services such as BigChampagne. It is also proposed to set up on the existing infrastructure of GEMA.

The advent of consumer levy in turn could be relatively easily on the Internet service provider, ie the Internet -providing telecommunications companies settled. These have already received all necessary customer information, so that no separate management infrastructure should be established.

Privacy Policy

Since the determination of the proportions of the individual artists requires a detection of user behavior, there are further privacy concerns. So the collected personal or group-related data could be misused, if the data were collected at a central location.

Examples

The Government of the Isle of Man wants to test a culture flat rate. The Chaos Computer Club is proposing a variant of the cultural value mark for implementation.