OII SDP 2007 (XXXII): Noank Media

Ismael Peña-López

17 years ago

While the technological solution behind Fisher’s model (2004), at a retailer/private level (i.e. Noank), is quite compelling, the concept itself looks exactly like the Spanish model (1941), the difference being that this sort of a gone-techie Spanish model regards only and exclusively the diffusion of digital content.
I don’t think that Fisher’s model at a State level (just exactly as the Spanish one, where it is hugely critizised), basing on income taxation, is Pareto Superior but, on the contrary, clearly harms the welfare of some citizens that would be willing to pay for e.g. some kind of music but not for another one, being the possibility that the taxes associated to this last kind of music consumption (plus the sort of music I like) were far higher than the will to pay for music.
If based on the devices and services, some other experiences (e.g. the canon in Spain) clearly show that it’s Pareto inferior by large, as it taxes lots of people not using those devices for the purposes that caused the taxation (e.g. CDs to store one’s data backups and not music)
Digital fingerprints have, in fact, some privacy issues, as they can be correlated with IPs
Rights management agencies (at least in Spain) act somehow like this and they really struggle to make significative estimates of culture consumption. Actually, there’s the danger taht marginal artists are underrepresented.