Title says it all really.

There was a fairly big crowd outside the council buildings in birmingham, so I went to ask what was going on. I was told by someone carrying a copy of the ‘morning star’ (the uk communist newspaper) that they had just had a council meeting about unions. The content of the meeting was unimportant. The simple fact there was a large gathering of communist supporters for such an event is potentially, a ‘sign of the’ new ‘times’.

One of the first of many for the communists in Britain? Are we going to see an uprising? Time will tell…

Sam

As time goes by, I get more and more agitated by the state of politics in general, but more specifically the state of politics in computer science.

It would appear to me, that as Gordon Brown continues to meddle with the economy (in a positive way) and David Cameron continues to slag him off for it, Britain needs a party of change. Furthermore, in my opinion, Britain needs a social-libertarian party of change.

This growing agitation has lead to my starting of a new chain of posts on the topic of politics and my ideologies. If you agree or disagree, thats fine – please feel free to comment. We all love alittle light hearted debate.

One thing i must make clear is that i’m no parlimentary researcher – my statistics are only what I can gather from the most reliable sources possible around the net. Thus, all my calculations can only be very rough. Please keep this in mind.

Lets get on with the show..

File sharing of Music

• What about a government that doesn’t pour money into trying to fight a loosing battle against file sharers, but makes the content available freely and subsidies the artist appropriately?

I know that is a rather fetched and costly affair, but if you pay the artists directly for the content as opposed to though middle men the price would not be too high. 40 Billion tracks were illegally file shared last year. So taking a exagerated estimate that 20% of those files were downloaded in the uk. We can do some sums…

5% of 40bn = 2bn files downloaded in the uk

45% of 79p (the actual amount an artist gets from a sale on iTunes) = 35.5p

2bn x 35.5p = £710m (total cost of subsidising all illegally downloaded music in the UK)

710m / 31.7m (number of tax payers in UK) = £22.40

So there you have it… the cost of fully subsidising all the illegal downloads in britain would be £22.40 to every tax payer for an entire year. That’s not bad considering the average tax payer pays ~£7 an hour in tax. So just over 3 hours work would cover it.

I’m going to leave you to ponder over the benefits of such a system, but think about how it could affect the following.

• Easier access to the industry for new comers
• ‘Get into arts’ schemes
• Less persecution, more help in (particularly young) peoples lives. (Gives the government a better reputation).
• Fairer deals etc. (95% of downloaded music in the world is done so illegally, make that 5% or 10% in the Uk and you’ve got a hefty salary increase – and if people want your music; then its well earnt).

Thanks alot for listening to me ramble for 400 words, I hope you feel you’ve learnt something from this post.

Sam

Where’d it go?

From the small fringe party in Sweden spawned a revolutionary anti-copyright force… but then it disappeared? In Britain anyway.

It’s a shame really… if anyone knows what happened to the Britsh Pirate Party, could they comment please?

I’d like to know more…

Sam