Sorry David, but your solution is not even close to solving the problem. With the advent of virtual CD drives, physical media are no longer relevant for piracy. All you have to do is download a CD image, mount it up, and you are good to go. No burning to CD is required. As long as the media can be read by a computer, any copy protection will be hacked. There are a lot of sick bastards out there that like to break copy protection schemes. Your solution does nothing more to stop "casual" piracy than CD copy protection measures already polluting the games market, and those do nothing to stop determined pirates.
Hefty media taxes will only hurt legitimate customers. Want to make a mix CD to listen to on your hour long commute to work? Well now it will cost you $10 above and beyond the cost of the music CDs you purchased in the first place... And then the ludicrous cost of backing up data this would impose...
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Oh and you better tax those mass duplication machines as well..because there's a good chunk of the pirating right there.
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Exactly... the people making money off of piracy have mass duplication machines at their disposal. It just isn't efficient if it is taking you 4-6 minutes to burn each CD, one by one. Not that this is an argument in favor of taxing them...
Look at VHS tapes. Content providers cried foul over how piracy on tape would ruin their industries. What really happened? A huge new industry of video tape sales and rental sprung up, creating a huge cash cow for them... Same thing with cassette tapes.