We're not talking about piracy here. I'm all in support of any bill that fights and gets these guys out of business. Experience over the last 10 years, since 1999, has shown that you kill one and another bunch spring up in China, where you absolutely have no judiciary authority to go after anybody.
At the same time as you're fighting the bad guys, we want actual market mechanisms that allow us to monetize the copies that are made, copies maybe from legitimate sources, right? Somebody legitimately buys a record and feels the need to put it on his iPod so he can jog to it. That is a copy made that under the new proposed bill I would get no reimbursement from, even though the person who is listening to his iPod derives a lot of enjoyment from it.
It's not that we're being defeatist. We're being, on one hand, realistic. On the other hand, while you're fighting crime, we want market mechanisms. You say that the levy is a tax. Taxes are at the discretion of government. So on one hand, you're a conduit, but where the money goes depends on government. The levy goes to artists only. There's no government. There's no other party with any sort of mandate standing between the levy and artists. So we want those mechanisms to stay in place to make sure that we can afford to continue making records.