Mind Scalpel

Michelle Malkin relays a Portfolio story on how Warner Music is spearheading a lobbying push for Congress to require a “music tax” be bundled into your monthly internet service provider fee — supposedly for unlimited access to “a database of all known music.”

Apart from the fact that the phrase “new tax” gets most people in a gun-polishin’, survivalist-cabin-buyin’, Libertarian-votin’ mood, the music industry has apparently completely missed the fact that there’s at least one enormous industry firmly in front of it in line: Pornographers!

You heard that right. Do you really think the first thing the geeks who originally developed the Internet thought, when they were done soldering the last wire in place, was “hey, now I can share music with someone”?

Not a chance. Nope, they were thinking “well, shoot! I can get access to international porn now! And without leaving the comfort of my futon!” And within seconds they were communicating with their like-minded Thai and Japanese geek friends, proving that porn truly is the universal language.

As it does for any new technology, porn has driven the Internet’s further development, to the point that the default expectation when you’re web surfing is that you’ll stumble over porn. You can Google “Sesame Street” and if your “safe search” setting is off, you’ll immediately be slapped with muppet porn. And believe me, muppet porn is the worst <shudder>.

I mean, would we tolerate a water supply that was essentially a river of sewage that forced us to hook up a reverse osmotic water purification system to every tap? I don’t think so. But that’s what we’ve got for our information exchange. It’s like being in a medieval city where you have to keep to the main streets, way away from the buildings, or risk getting a bucket of nightsoil dumped on your head.

When it comes to deciding who to tax, in other words, I would argue that the Internet already is “a database of all known porn” — so much for keeping your recipes on the computer! And if anyone has a right to complain about geeks and teenagers ripping them off for years, it’s those poor pornographers. But just try pushing through a porn tax! Won’t happen.

So the music industry really is rather quaint in its belief that everyone’s sitting around downloading their stuff. Sure, it’s happening, but the main thing that’s being downloaded doesn’t have anything like good melodies associated with it. At most, it’s got a kind of royalty-free, 70s-synthesizer generic “wacka wok, wacka wok” to it.

Or so I’ve heard.

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