[Rumori] re: The Artistic Freedom Voucher

[Taylor McLaren]

I'm sitting here (offline) on my lunch break, reading through the 
morning's mail, so I apologize if my questions are covered on the 
source site (which I'll be checking out later in the day).
   However, I'm curious: has any consideration been given to how to 
extend this system beyond the confines of (presumably) the United 
States? I mean, a $100 "tax" might not seem back-breaking in a lot of 
places, but that's several months' wages in some Asian countries. I 
don't think that the idea of a "flat" tax that's assessed differently 
in different countries is such a bad idea, but any system that's going 
to regard the Internet as a distribution system is going to have to 
puzzle out how payments can  be made all around the world.
   Also, assuming that the AFV system starts small and pays a set 
"salary" (lots of quotation marks today) to a given number of creative 
workers, it sounds a lot like the licensing systems used to regulate 
taxi drivers, hot dog stands, etc., in most large cities. Again, that's 
not really a bad thing, but since there's usually competition for those 
licenses, how would the proposed system deal with creative types who 
weren't having productive years? All kinds of big-name musicians can go 
seven or eight years at a stretch without releasing an album... would 
they lose their license in the process?

-me