France pitches Google Tax to save music, books

How to help prop up the ailing music industry? Tax Google, a new report commissioned by the French government suggests.

The report, handed to Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand on Wednesday, says Google and other internet portals should be slapped with a new tax on their online ad revenues in France to fund the development of legal outlets for buying books, movies and especially music on the internet.

The proposal is the latest idea to emerge amid France's efforts to fight illegal file-sharing and impose order French-style on the free-for-all that is the internet.

The plan "seemed inevitable to us, if we want to maintain a certain pluralism in the culture world" and prevent the "endless enrichment of two or three world players who will impose their cultural formatting on us," Patrick Zelnik, a record producer who helped lead the mission, was quoted as telling Liberation newspaper.

Google appears cool to the idea, but sought a conciliatory tone. Google France's public affairs director said the company told the mission it wanted "co-operation between internet players and the cultural fields to develop new models."

Olivier Esper said there were opportunities to promote innovative solutions "instead of continuing on a path that opposes the internet and the cultural worlds, for example the path of taxation."

Opposition to proposal

Critics say the plan would be messy to implement and that internet portals would shoulder an unfair share of the burden.

"Where does it start and stop? The argument is that Google has culpability for declining music revenues because people start searches for illegal files often by Google," said Mark Mulligan, vice-president of Forrester Research. But "what about the computers? Because without the computer people wouldn't be able to download. And then what about the electricity that powers the computer?"

Mulligan also says the proposal "encourages laziness from the music industry, because ultimately they are saying, you don't have to dig your way out of the problem, we'll let other companies do that for you."

The proposal is still in the early stages, and the report doesn't spell out specifics like exactly how much new tax the portals would pay, on top of the taxes that they, like all companies, already contribute. It does estimate, however, that "given the size of the ad market on the internet, this measure could eventually bring in 10 million euros[about $14.8 million Cdn] a year."

Last month, a French judge ruled that the U.S. internet search giant must pay the equivalent of $458,000in damages and interest to French publisher La Martinire for unauthorized reproduction of the latter's copyrighted works without compensation

Google was also ordered to pay $15,275 per day until it removes extracts of the French books from its online Google Books database.

The French society of authors and composers, SACD, praised the ideas as "audacious and pertinent."

France's president and culture minister are studying the report, and it is not yet known when they will respond, the Culture Ministry said.