France's 'Culture Tax' Could Hit YouTube and Facebook 314
PolygamousRanchKid writes with this excerpt from BusinessWeek: "Should YouTube subsidize le cinéma français? France's audiovisual r.egulator thinks so. In a report this week, the Superior Audiovisual Council (CSA) says that video-sharing websites should be subject to a tax that helps finance the production of French films and TV shows. ... Although the CSA report says that videos posted online by private individuals should not be subject to taxation, it contends that video-sharing sites increasingly have become 'professional' content providers. ... Separately, France is considering a tax on smartphones, tablets, and other devices as another source of revenue for cultural subsidies. The proposed tax would raise an estimated €86 million annually that would be used to finance the 'cultural industries' digital transition,' France's Culture Ministry said at the time."
Re:Frogs (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually French films are rather good. But as another poster said, Americans tend to remake French films. With an example being the original French film, "Anything for Her", being played by Russell Crowe or one you should know... "True Lies". Or did you know about "The Tourist"? I am not going to espouse that French films are superior, they tend to drivel quite a bit at times. However, to say that they have no talent shows that you are ignorant on movies.
Re:Taxes. (Score:5, Interesting)
No, it's important to make everyone pay by the rules. Anarchist bullshit you're spewing sounds nice if you have a strong anarchist bend, but otherwise, it sounds quite insane. Reality is that taxation is about preventing the suffering, rather than creating it. It creates safety nets, pays for medicine, police, fire protection and so on. It guarantees some income even if you lose your job, or get hurt. It lets you go to work when you have young children and gives you a place to put them in daycare. It provides centralized and functional education system. And countless other things.
Tax dodging is what generates suffering, heavy suffering at that. Much of the current budget problems in France are because traditional tax revenues are dying up - because of increasing paths of tax evasion being available to traditionally large contributors, such as large companies.
Companies that dodge this need to be taxed like others, both to prevent suffering and to allow competition to survive and adapt. They should not be allowed to effectively steal their contribution from taxation pool as they do now while destroying their competition though these unfair means.
Re:Not Culture (Score:5, Interesting)
the French have an uphill struggle making a movie profitable even if it were the world's best movie, because they are in French.
The absolute best example to counter this line of reasoning is Japan. Their pop culture is so powerful that the almost unsurmountable fact of "it's in Japanese!" offers no obstacle for its spread all around. If French cultural production was culturally powerful people would be flocking to it, learning French for the sake of watching the original, organizing fansub efforts to illegally subtitle French movies, shows and comics into dozens of languages, create sites to host thousands of fanfics, fanarts etc. about their most beloved French shows, and so on and so forth. Nothing of this happens for the simple reason that French cultural production fails miserably at touching the hearts and minds of anyone but a small minority among even the French.
Also, while today almost no one is interested in learning the French language, until before WW2 it was the international language. Everyone everywhere learned French and talked with people from other countries in French. By capitalizing all that goodwill France had the opportunity to become not only the center of high culture and science it already was, but also of becoming the undisputed superpower in matter of global popular culture. It didn't want to, it still doesn't want to, and as such its cultural producers are reduced to begging the government for money.
As long as they continue accusing externalities such as the (utterly irrelevant) worldwide number of French speakers for their lack of success, they'll continue failing. No, they have no one other than themselves to blame. That's all there is to it.
Re:Not Culture (Score:4, Interesting)
the corporations spend millions upon millions to brainwash the masses into believing that the corporate offerings are all there is
You're still talking like we're in the 1990's, and overthinking it at that. Anyone who ever browsed Youtube knows that's false and that the corporate offerings are a small part of what's out there. No, they still watch blockbuster movies because they like them. Then they get home (or open their mobile phones) and watch from dozens to hundreds of independently produced stuff per month.
the corporations actually have sent take down notices to block original content
An anecdote doesn't science makes. Yes, this happens. No, it isn't prevalent. If it were you wouldn't be citing one example to make your point, you'd be giving a statistic. If there's one it'll probably show such invalid takedowns amount to a small fraction of a percent.
What doesn't mean media corporations wouldn't love to be able to do it to everything they dislike. They just cannot. Whatever their power is, and it is certainly huge, it isn't that huge. And they're shrinking. Unless they change drastically to cope with the reality of an Internet that cannot be domesticated, in a few decades they'll have all but disappeared. And there'll be much rejoicing, for I'm with you in my dislike for them as corporations. As for the stuff they produce however, nope, those are neither "the" nor "a" problem. Both things are unrelated and shouldn't be mixed.
Re:Frogs (Score:3, Interesting)
If we are going to discuss cutting oil company "subsidies", let us discuss the specific subsidies and the relative merits, or lack there of, of those subsidies. We need to be aware of who, besides the oil companies, may benefit from these subsidies and what effect these subsidies may, or may not, have on the behavior of various organizations (including the oil companies). All too often, we have this discussion about generic "subsidies to the oil companies." We need to discuss specifics. I agree that federal spending must be reduced, but all too often when I bring up some specific program, I am told, "You can't do that" by people who turn around and say we should cut spending in the generic area which that spending is part of.