Back in October last year, Walled Culture wrote about a proposed law in France that would see a tax imposed on AI companies, with the proceeds being paid to a collecting society. Now that the EU’s AI Act has been adopted, it is being invoked as another reason why just such a system should be set up. The French collecting society SPEDIDAM (which translates as “Society for the collection and distribution of performers rights”) has issued a press release on the idea, including the following (translation via DeepL)
What’s sickening is that in some sense, this could be a way to solve a lot of legal hassles in one fell swoop. They get a predictable rate card, and then there’s a clearly defined legal window for generative-AI products, saving decades of fights in the courts.
But it won’t ever be that. The rights industry will never be satisfied, and it will just be the foot in the door to ever higher fees and restrictions. This is exactly the same fiasco as blank-media levies: they never fully evolved into a full “you paid once” sanction for free copying, so all it did was become a tax for a specific private beneficiary.