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My bad - it's the Canadian Independent Music Association (CIMA), not the CRIA.

I'm sure this will work out perfectly for them. I mean, take a look up here at Canada. Best Buy Canada is owned by Future Shop. And Future Shop opened their own digital music download store, too. It's called Bonfire, and...

Wait, what's that? Oh, okay, it wasn't really their own download store. It was just Puretracks with a custom skin on it. In any case, it blazed their trail into the future of music downloads and...

Huh? Oh. Okay, it turns out Bonfire was a massive flop and was shut down this year.

Well, in any case, I'm sure that Best Buy USA's third-party, rebranded online music store will do much better than Best Buy Canada's third-party, re-branded online music store did.

PS: To give you an idea of how well this is going to turn out, this is the same company that decided it would be a good idea to sell "branded" mp3 players. Basically it was 128MB player that "came with" a few tracks, all for the low, low price of $169. Mmm, dollar-store MP3 player with DRM'd tracks for more than the cost of an iPod. Success!

If I remember correctly hadn't the Canadian Supreme court already decided that downloading music for personal use was within our rights? If that's the case then can't we rely on that case as a precedent to help render this presumed upcoming law void? http://www.cirpa.ca/Page.asp?PageID=122&ContentID= 824&SiteNodeID=66

They do. In the UK there's the Association of Independent Music, and in Australia there's AIR. In Canada there's CIRPA, and in the US there's the A2IM. I found these by taking a few seconds to goodle on "independent record labels."

Many, if not most of them, do issue press releases, as you suggest.

I suspect that while the indie labels aren't suing people left and right, they may not be as pro-piracy as you expect. I knew a fellow once who ran an indie record label. He had ten employees and paid himself the princely sum of $20K per year. When x% of the population opted to pirate rather than buy a CD from a major label, all it meant was that somebody you never heard of got laid off or didn't get a raise that year. When his artists' works started showing up on the P2P services, it meant that he had to lay off his friends. Although it's the major labels (through their mouthpiece, the RIAA) make the most noise about piracy, the large RIAA-affiliated labels are actually more resilient to piracy, while the indie labels often run on razor-thin budgets. We can talk about how piracy actually helps the artist because it gets their music out there, we might buy a shirt or go to a concert, etc. but the reality for the tiny 10-person labels (who put up the cash to fund the CDS and who rely on sales to stay in business) is that they must pay the rent and pay their employees each month -- no exceptions, no excuses. If income isn't meeting expenses, it's simply not enough that some 17-year-old in Minnesota loves the copy of your CD that he got via BitTorrent.

Not to mention complete, balls-out arrogance as to their own importance:

We must not enter into political arrangements with countries ill-prepared to adequately protect our greatest economic assets.

So the RIAA did $12 billion in sales last year (link) That's *total* of all sales, including sales of downloads. In comparison, General Motors had $193 billion in revenue. (link)

You tell me which one's the real "great economic asset".

But shouldn't the Canadian Government be doing the refunding? They mandated it, they probably took the money from Apple as it was collected, seems like Apple gets screwed twice, along with Canadian citizens.

The government never collecting any funds - that was handled by the now-looking-for-something-else-to-do Canadian Private Copying Collective. Furthermore, the CPCC held all levy proceeds in trust and will be returning them to the manufacturers. Thus, Apple is merely returning money that was never theirs.

No word, however, on whether Apple return the iTunes Store fees for any Celine Dion tracks purchased in an alcohol-and-tranquilizer-induced fit of misguided patriotism.

I always feel like the record companies fooled us when CD's came out. Sure, they sounded great, but when CD's were new, vinyl LP's were now $7, and the CD was $14-16, with the excuse that "we are capacity constrained, when we get more capacity, prices will be much cheaper, because these things are cheap to make".

This is absolutely true. But that's completely different from "IF YOU DO NOT CREATE THE MATERIAL, YOU CAN DO ONLY WHAT CREATOR SAYS YOU CAN" from the parent post. Yes, there are some restrictions, but they are very limited. By the way, depending on what country you live in you can generally "copy it whenever I want" and in others you can copy it under a fairly wide range of circumstances. For example, in Canada it is legal to borrow a CD from a friend and copy it and even P2P downloading and sharing are legal for music. And yet CD sales in Canada have increased. (I find it funny when sales decrease the music industry blames it on P2P and when sales increase they blame it on "publicity arising from music industry efforts to sue illegal file swappers" -- which doesn't even recognize that it is legal in Canada.)