I think there's a lot of attractiveness to the concept of a levy. I think the problem to date has been that many of the proposals, with all respect, haven't addressed a lot of the complications that arise in the context of a levy.
There are problems of marketplace distortion in that you're going to have consumers buying some of those same products outside the country. The result will be that we will lose tax dollars, retailers will get hurt, and the artists won't get anything at all. I think there are problems of distorting the actual prices of some of these products, if you use the model that we have with CDs. I think also that with the exception of the songwriter association's proposal, which I think has the most merit as a starting point for discussion, there is a little bit of bait and switch that takes place here, with all respect. The argument is that since there's a lot of file sharing taking place, we need to compensate it by way of a levy, yet outside of the songwriters, I haven't seen any group acknowledge that if we were to have that levy, the file sharing they are decrying would be legalized.
I don't see how you can have your cake and eat it too. If we're going to propose establishing a levy to compensate for the copying that takes place—by and large, as we all know, through file-sharing networks—then the quid pro quo quite clearly ought to be full legalization of that copying, but I have not yet seen that come forward as a proposal. Usually it's just that we want to port the same levy to other devices.