I just want to clarify. Mr. Skolnik, I believe when you were talking about extending the levy to digital audio recorders you used terminology—I can't remember it exactly, and I quickly wrote it down. You said something about extended use of copies, storage, and duplication. It just struck me. I got to thinking about the way I listen to music or use music. In the past, say in the mid-1990s, I would buy CDs and get one of those storage towers and put them in the living room of my apartment. Then I'd have a few different CD players that I'd play the music on. I paid for my CD, but that was it. I paid for my CD and then I could play it.
Now the parallel to that is I buy my music. I may still buy CDs because sometimes I like to get the liner notes and things like that, but I store them on a computer, which becomes much more convenient than the CD tower, and I can put the CDs away if I want. I play them on my iPad or iPod.
It seems to me this idea of paying an extra levy for where you store your music or where you play your music from would be like having a levy on a CD tower that I would buy from IKEA or the stereo that I played my music on in the past.
The irony here is that because it's more convenient, I actually buy much more music than I ever bought before. I spend more money on music than I ever would have spent before. There is more revenue coming from me than before because of the new models, the new technology. Yet your argument is that somehow I should have to pay for my storage. I should have to pay additionally for my iPad. I also have an iPod, so I pay additionally now for my iPod, even though I'm playing the same music. I don't very often sit in a room and listen to it on three different devices at the same time. It's the same music. I'm listening to it on the same device, as I would have taken my CD and played it on a CD player or a stereo in a different room.
Why should I pay three times to listen to the same piece of music once I have paid for it?