Of Broadband and Tax Cuts

[David Farber <farber () tmail com>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Barry Frankel <bfrankel () PrincetonCapital com>
To: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Subject: Of Broadband and Tax Cuts
Date: Thu, 09 Jan 2003 11:00:47 -0500

Dave,


I was reading about President Bus's plan to stimulate the economy by 
reducing taxes by $647 billion.  This is a lot of money especially when 
you compare it to the stimulus that the economy got from the internet 
boom at a far lower cost from government funding the development of 
technology.  This led me to wonder if it won't be a better stimulus for 
the economy if rather than reducing taxes, the government licensed the 
digital rights to music and video content from the record companies, 
television networks,  and the movie studios and allowed companies to 
freely distribute content from web sites.

According to the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2002 (H.R. 
5057) Congress estimated that in 2001, the motion picture industry lost 
$3,000,000,000 in potential worldwide revenue, the music industry lost 
$4,300,000,000 worldwide.  This is a total of only $7.3 billion dollars 
and is little more than one percent of the proposed tax cut.  And even 
if the cost for content licensing were doubled the cost would still be 
small compared to a $647 billion tax cut.

The impact of free content should have a significant on the economy.  PC 
sales would boom.  Telecom networks would see a significant growth in 
the demand for broadband access.  VCs would come out of shell shock and 
begin to invest in start up companies.

What do you and others think about stimulating the economy by making 
content freely available?

Barry Frankel
-- Dave

-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com
To unsubscribe or update your address, click
 http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/