[p2p-research] Buy all media companies together for three pennies a day?

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Just one more off-the-wall idea inspired by rereading through the media 
section something I wrote in 2004:
   http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html
(I forget a lot of stuff I write after I write it. :-)

I'm wondering if we could put a price tag on all the media companies of the 
world? Let's say it was US$1 trillion. That's just a guess based on a lot of 
big media companies being worth a few billion dollars and assuming there are 
fifty or so big ones of declining sizes. It would be nice if someone had a 
better figure.

Then, hypothetically, maybe one could get a bank loan for that amount and 
buy them *all*. :-) The interest payments on that loan, at say, 5% might 
only be US$50 billion a year, and add in an extra US$20 billion a year to 
retire the principal in thirty years or so.

Once we owned all those media companies, there would no longer be people 
lobbying to extend media laws about DRM and copyright and so on, so it would 
be straightforward to get the laws changed back to something reasonable. :-)

So, basically, for US$70 billion a year or so (the interest at 5% on a 
trillion dollars), we could tame the copyright monster. :-)

So, if we divide that cost by about seven billion people on Earth, the cost 
to tame copyright works out to US$70 billion divided by seven billion 
people, or about US$10 a year per person (about £7? per year).

Or far less (under 5%) of the £139.50 annual BBC TV license fee for a mostly 
free internet globally. :-)
   http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/licencefee/

(Yet, I guess we would have to buy the BBC too, as part of that. Not sure 
they are for sale as a public organization or what they would be valued at, 
of course, but I'd imagine the UK might take US$20 billion for it? :-)

US$10 dollars a year per person is only about US$0.03 cents a day per 
person. Basically, three US pennies a day per person globally is all that 
stands between us and deep copyright reform. :-)

Silly, I know, but it shows how approachable the problem may be, someday, 
once we have a global mindshift and get our collective act together better.
   http://www.global-mindshift.org/memes/wombat.swf

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/