Comment The logic here is rubbish (Score 1) 693
The author of this idea obviously didn't think it through more than five seconds.
As with Napster, the $5 a month is a subscription fee; the music is only playable while you stay subscribed. This isn't true of music that has been pirated over P2P networks or via another source.
Perhaps it would be valid to say the penalty would be $5 a month for the rest of your life. Payable in advance, of course.
Next, if you swap music via P2P, you're not just downloading, you're uploading-- you're contributing to and enabling others' infringements. The industry may well choose, instead of going after each download, to go after every upload. So if one hundred users downloaded a single song from you (or any combination of songs) then your penalty would be $5 a month for the rest of your life, times one hundred.
If you're twenty, and you expect to live until eighty, that's $360,000. Not millions of dollars, to be sure, but not anything that anyone would want to have to pay.
Oh, and burnable downloads? That costs extra. Since every pirated track is burnable, they'd probably try to assess that, too.
As with Napster, the $5 a month is a subscription fee; the music is only playable while you stay subscribed. This isn't true of music that has been pirated over P2P networks or via another source.
Perhaps it would be valid to say the penalty would be $5 a month for the rest of your life. Payable in advance, of course.
Next, if you swap music via P2P, you're not just downloading, you're uploading-- you're contributing to and enabling others' infringements. The industry may well choose, instead of going after each download, to go after every upload. So if one hundred users downloaded a single song from you (or any combination of songs) then your penalty would be $5 a month for the rest of your life, times one hundred.
If you're twenty, and you expect to live until eighty, that's $360,000. Not millions of dollars, to be sure, but not anything that anyone would want to have to pay.
Oh, and burnable downloads? That costs extra. Since every pirated track is burnable, they'd probably try to assess that, too.
