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Canadians [Will] Pay Levy on MP3 Players - Updated
Capt. Canuck writes "According to this Toronto Star story,
the Canadian Copyright Board may approve a 20% levy on electronic media tomorrow,
including MP3 players and hard drives. With the Canadian Dollar
rising and this on the horizon, maybe now is the right time to get that
iPod." Update: 12/12 16:33 GMT by M : rcpitt writes "The Canadian Copyright Board has (finally - a year late) issued its ruling on the latest round of blank media levy - the controversial (in the rest of the world as well as Canada) private "tax" on recordable media used to copy music which proceeds go to the music artists in Canada. The ruling by the board and a press release were posted to the Board's web site at 10AM Ottawa (CST) today. The ruling continues the levy amounts from the previous 2 year period (2001-2002) to the end of this period (2003-2004) at the same amounts as previously set but adds new levies on portable (MP3) digital audio recorders of from CDN$2/unit to CDN$25/unit depending on internal storage capacity."
You're paying for it now, so copy as you like. Don't feel remorse. The government is just making it easy - now Canadians can download music and movies off the Internet instead of wasting time walking to a store. You think the recording industry would dare take you to court and lose when the judge learns that you paid them for it already? That court loss would open the floodgates!
Use this stuff for legitimate reasons only? Go buy in the US. You have a right to do that.
Why does one group get to have its way with all digital media without respect for other groups? Why is it that musicians and songwriters deserve to impose a "guilty until proven innocent" handout? If they get that much, then what will happen when other groups ask for them? What about film producers and movie studios? What about software companies? What about print publishers? If you take all of these groups into consideration, given what is already charged, the average CD blank will end up with a $4 per blank tax.
Great. The deal is then that I will get all of my software, music and books from warez newsgroups, filesharing networks and wherever else I can.
Does this make any sense whatsoever? Because if these groups think they can tax all this blank media, they will utterly destroy retail sales of both original media and blanks and the incentive of the consumer to engage in purchases thereof. This will end up hurting the artists represented by the collective. They will also drive blank media into the underground where trucks haul this stuff into black markets. Who loses in this scheme? Everyone but the people who supposedly get these taxes.
I consult for a living in the video editing and commercial production field, and now I have to tell my clients to make an emergency purchase tomorrow of spindles of DVD-Rs, CD-Rs and any other media and stockpile them because of this ridiculous tax. My clients don't deal in pirated material, and often we have to license music, images and footage from the creators anyway. They will never be able to apply for the proceeds from these taxes because they'll never qualify.
Enough is enough. E-mail Claude Majeau at majeau.claude@cb-cda.gc.ca and let him know what you think of him and his band of thugs. Find the MP for your riding and tell them that the Canadian Copyright Board needs to be stopped before they destroy retail sales in Canada and end up fueling mass piracy and the black market for the sake of artists who should be paid based on the merits of their music, not because they have been somehow directly robbed.
The Canadian prices for iPods are $439, $579, and $729 for 10GB, 20GB and 40GB iPods, respectively. You must pay 7% GST on top of anything that you buy.
The US prices for iPods are $299, $399, and $499 for the same above. If you're not in California you only pay shipping and no tax.
At $1.32 Canadian exchange rate, assuming no skimming by your bank, the US prices to Canadians are $395, $527, and $658. Aside from the difference in price, to then bring it across the border you will be charged 7% GST and unknown amounts of excise, brokerage, inspection and other taxes, and they're not small change. I can guarantee you that it will end up costing you more to order it from the US if you're in Canada.
More proof that the Canadian dollar should be at around $1.50 or that prices in Canada should fall. Every Canadian iPod sold makes Apple in Cupertino extra profit at this point, and there's nothing that Canadians can do about it.
What you are talking about is called Purchase Power Parity. The economist does this cool little thing where they use the Big Mac to compute the purchase power parity of each currency.
The reason the purchase power parity can very so much from currency to currency is primarily because of the financial interest in the U.S. Markets which drives the demand for our currency up.
Unfortunately for us American's, eventually the worth of our strong dollar must eventually fall to put it back into line with PPP.
Having a high PPP is a double edged sword though. If you have a high PPP, it means you can buy a lot of stuff from abroad with your dollar. However, conversely, your stuff looks high priced compared to other country's stuff. Thus, you tend to run trade-deficits. Eventually, it will balance out.
With some (Future Shop, par example), it is included in the cost of the media. You don't see it, and people are less annoyed by it.
With others (Londons Drugs) they charge the tax at the time of sale. You then get a bill a lot larger than expected (for CD-bundles), and many people blame it on the store rather than placing blame retarded laws and corporate hand-holding as it should be.
I think that having the tax inclusive is one of the reasons that people aren't awake/more-pissed-off about this. If everybody who bought CD's found that they increased by 25-50% at the point of sale, I think there would be a lot more of a push to have the laws repealed.
As somebody who buys the media to store data or legal music, I wonder if I would be in my rights to pursue a lawsuit for being wrongfully charged what is equivilent to a fine on anyone who buys digital media.
This is government stupidity at it's best. As it is a levy, and not a tax, it CANNOT be collected by Customs. It is a level which is collected when sold to a RETAILER. (Note: that is any company which will sell the end product to the consumer. That includes 'wholesalers' when selling to the public.).
But it means they cannot collect the levy if I order DVD-Rs from the U.S., or take a trip south and bring back an iPod.
(Note: it can be difficult to get consumer electronics mailed across the boarder, but picking them up yourself isn't hard.)
(thats how I got my Tivo; and it was fully declaired to customs when I came back).
Check out London Drug's official position. Also worth a look is the Canadian Coalition for Fair Digital Access - a non-profit group against all this foolishness. Especially look at their member companies - they include the likes of London Drugs, AMD, Intel, Creative Labs, Apple, Dell, FutureShop/Best Buy, Hewlett PAQard, Wal-Mart, Radio Shack and (sweet Jesus, is this one right?) Sony Canada.
A man who can't pronouce "nuclear arsenal" shouldn't have one -sig ends here.
Background
The levy started in 1999, based on a change to the Canadian copyright act in 1995, and is up for changes every 2 years. This round is for the years 2003-2004, and yes, it is actually a year late.
The previous round had a whole 3 objectors - all consortiums - retailers, importers, hardware creators - no private individuals.
This round started out with 100 objectors - winnowed down to about 30 by the time the actual submissions and legalities got going. The hearings were to take place around October of 2002 with the ruling by the end of 2002.
In reality, the hearings didn't start until the end of January, 2003 and ran to the middle of February - and the ruling is only now coming out.
Having lived through this period, written much and run a (closed) mail list for the objectors, you might expect me to have some idea of what the outcome will be - but truthfully I don't. All bets are off since this round there was a lot more information presented as well as some interesting twists - new ideas as opposed to just countering the CPCC's presentation and ideas.
The article that started this thread is quoting information that was available over a year ago - some of which was changed during the hearings. CPCC started out asking for CDN$21/Gig for "non-removeable hard drive" in each MP3 player but ended up proposing a sliding scale starting at (all figures in Canadian $) $11.10/Gig for first down to $1.99/Gig for anything over 20 Gigs. Note that this would apply to any media - FLASH, RAM, or "micro-hard disk" but doesn't apply to "full-size" hard disks used in non-portable devices such as PCs (they intimate that these are reserved for a future round)
Rather than detail all of the things that went on during the 18+ months since I started (due to my blood boiling while hearing a couple of coleagues discuss this at a Comdex show) I'll point you at the pages on my web site at my Media Levy pages
I'll post a summary of the actual levy as soon as I can in the morning.
In response to some of the postings here:
The current Canadian Copyright Act allows "private individuals" to make copies of music from wherever they can for their own private use. This means that my friend can loan me their retail-purchased music CD and I can make my own copy of it and give them back their original - or I can make a copy of my own retail-purchased CD for my self and give my friend the original - or I can make a copy of music I receive from whatever other medium (radio, TV, Internet) for my own use.
What I can't do is make a copy of my retail-purchased CD and give the copy to my friend
It also does not allow me to publish music I "own" to the Internet or make bulk copies and sell them - that is still "piracy".
The levy is only on products imported or manufactured for resale. This means that a private individual may import (for example) a tube of 100 CD-Rs for their own use from the US and not have to pay the levy. The Canadian Customs people at the border don't care and are not empowered to collect the levy (although they'll collect the GST and provincial sales tax). Currently it is just about a wash to order a tube of 100 CD-Rs from the US, pay the shipping and tax - but if the levy is doubled this will make the difference up to about $25 for 100 CD-Rs - well worth it for the average Canadian to learn how to use the Internet for e-commerce. This is what the retailers are upset about. With things like the Apple iPOD, the potential gain from ordering from outside of Canada is even greater!
CPCC (Canadian Private Copying Consortium) has graciously allowed for "zero-rating" for those who wish to register ($50 annual fee) as an importer/manufacturer of blank audio media that is not used to record music (i.e. is used to record data
Been there, done that, paid for the T-shirt
and didn't get it