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Canadians May Face 25% Download Tariff
C-Yo writes "While Canadians have battled against an iPod tariff for more than a
year, now comes news that Canada's copyright collectives are seeking a
tariff on iTunes as well. Professor
Michael Geist (who last
week dismantled music industry claims about peer-to-peer) reports
that one collective is demanding an incredible 25% of the gross revenue
of music download services as well as 15% of webcasters' gross revenue
and 10% of gamers gross revenue (free
version of report or Toronto
Star reg. version). When combined with other tariff
proposals, it would appear that Canada's collectives want to the kill
the download industry, demanding at least 40% of everything iTunes,
Napster, and other new services earn."
I don't really like our new music & movie association overlords. Thank goodness for sites such as www.allofmp3.com. Since I already pay a tax on my blank media, I feel no shame in downloading from KaZaA or Usenet or Morpheus or IRC. And the music & movie industries blatant cash grabs such as this are simply going to make it harder for legitimate business to prosper, since users won't be as eager to move to them. Quite frankly, since I pay the copyright tax, I really haven't bought that many CD's. However, the movie industry still makes a killing off my kids
This is a manifestation of one fear I have about publicly owned internet access monopolies (municipal WiFi). Some activist city council somewhere could decide that these sorts of taxes are just the thing needs to fund libraries, kiddie daycare, free everything, etc. Or, perhaps, activist city councils could decide to ban access to politically incorrect activities on the internet (e.g. cigarette purchasing).
There are dangers to collectivist centralization. Give me the hell of high stakes competition and unclear standards.
Yep, same in Sweden too... And in place since the cassettes here too.
It's a compensation for our fair use laws, it's said. Because you can copy music to your close friends and not violate any laws, they're said to need this compensation.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
My first reaction from reading the blurb, was "Oh crap, a 40% price increase on iTMS?"
After reading the article and re-reading the summary, the key point here is that these groups want up to 40% of the gross revenue. Unfortunately I'm not 100% certain as to the definition of "gross revenue," but if as I suspect, that means "whatever is left in the bank after paying the related expenses" then this would be 40% of Apple's cut. If they (or the runners of other music download services, for that matter) only get to see 5% of my $0.99, and assuming they raise their price to cover this tarriff, then that would only be a 2% increase.
Of course, I may be wrong in my understanding. IANALOA (lawyer or accountant).
Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
From the article:
"...The SODRAC/CMRRA proposals demand the greater of either 15 percent of gross revenues or ten cents per permanent download..." Emphasis mine.
If by "permanent download", they mean non-DRM encumbered file that I may have unlimited personal use in perpetuity, then to me, that is a fair tradeoff for a small tarriff. The 25% figure quoted on the front page would be way too high, but if I can legally download an mp3/flac/ogg/whatever and burn it as many times, put it on as many portable players, and stream it from as many computers as I want for my own personal use, without some retarded DRM app phoning home to ask for permission, then that might be worth a small surcharge.
If they insist or crippling it with DRM or if (download price + tarrif) > (price I'm willing to pay), then guess what? They've just outsmarted themselves out of potential revenue (though we know who they'll want to blame for that...)
True, legimate buyers end up covering the costs of the thieves, but the same goes for any other industry (retail, insurance, etc). I think it's more important for both sides to compromise a bit to keep the system usable for the vast majority of legitimate users, then to screw everyone in sight.
they simply want to be the only ones that can do it. The simplest way to do that is to have the government tax any competition out of existence, and then make any such competition illegal. iTunes is certainly competition (even though it has to pay royalties for every song it sells). And, sure as Hell's a mantrap, you can bet that there will "exceptions" to any such tax regulations that exempt the big boys from forking over a penny. It stinks, any way you look at it.
... well, I certainly won't shed many tears for them.
Where it got written (in either Canadian or U.S. law) that monopolies are entitled to maintenance and protection by either of our respective governments is beyond me. It's ridiculous. I'm sorry, I like music as much as the next man, but I don't consider the studios to be such an important national treasure that they can't be allowed to stand a little competition. And, if that competition proves to be a little too stiff and the music cartels just happen to go under
I believe they are the "evil entities" that both Captain Kirk and Captain Picard referred to in a number of episodes.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
"Canadians May Face 25% Download Tariff"
:-)
Canadians are not facing ANYTHING. The governing party is in the midst of the biggest political scandal in 50 years. In addition, they are a minority government. They were only able to pass the budget because the conservatives were not ready for an election and allowed it to pass. By all the indication of the polls the next government will be a Conservative minority. That government won't be able to pass a bill against murder let alone something as complex as copyright. Canadians, for the forseeble future, have a government that is for all intent and purposes, nuttered; Just as it should be
Official Conservative Party policy is to eliminate the levy on blank recording materials. Since they are about to win the next election to be held (most likely) in June, this particular problem is solved.
because we have the same large music corperations (Sony etc.) but who knows maybe they're bitter.
If you've been paying attention, you'd know that they ARE bitter. They couldn't convince Apple in the US to raise their prices past the $1/track point, so now they're crying to the Canadian government to force them to raise prices where real capitalism failed.
Don't see what corporate farm subsidies are getting me for my money. Maybe you, the master of economy, could explain it.
The Farewell Tour II
You guys really have that corporate welfare thing kicking up there
CanCopy doesn't represent corporate interests. It represents individual authors.
Tell you what: you get informed, and then we can talk. Until then, you're just another jerk with a Canuck-bashing agenda. You can "call it like you see it" all you like, but you see it wrong and I'd rather not waste my time with you.
www.kitchengeek.com -- Nosh for
At the moment, in Canada and the Netherlands. It is legal to download copyrighted "works of art". This is because we all pay a tariff on blank tapes, CDs and DVDs. The money ends up in an organization that's supposed to distribute the money to the artists that received less money from you because you copied their CD from a family member instead of buying their offical CD with money.
.mp3.
There are a few problems with this, but overall it's a good system:
* I'm not sure about this one but it might not be a government organisation that receives and redistributes the tarrifs, but an organisation that's tied closely to the entertainment industry. If you're not a member of that organisation you won't be able to claim "home copy" money. MAYBE the home copy money is only ending up at the big record companies and at 5 different other layers between the "buyer/home copier" and the artist that made the "work of art". If the distribution organisation would be run fairly, by the government, and money would be paid to everyone (not just members) I wouldn't have any problems with this model. At the moment, I'm afraid David DeAngelo isn't getting money from me because he's probably not a member of that organisation.
* At the moment only the people buying blank CDs, DVDs and other blank media are the ones paying "home copy" money. This is actually good in my opinion. Because only the stuff that you thought was good enough to burn on CD will end up costing you money. NOT the crap that you downloaded and decided to delete. In a very roundabout way you're paying the tariff for a CD that you know is going to become something in the future that you like. It's like you've become a mini factory that creates music CDs and at the same time you're your own factory's customer because you've "bought" that "manufactured" CD with the tariff. Or something like that. I like this system because it makes it legal do download stuff and "they" don't have to care about what you do with your internet connection. ONLY the stuff that you thought was good enough to "buy" by putting it on the DVD will cost you money. They try to figure out how much copyrighted stuff will end up burnt onto DVD and decide on the height of the tarrif based on that. I guess. As long as they don't snoop on my internet traffic to determine how to distribute the money I'm okay with the tariff.
* It might not be fair to the people who are buying CDs ONLY for backup of non-copyrighted material. They're paying extra for blank media for no reason. However, I think this scenarion is uncommon. They could look at it as something to prevent breach of privacy for society. If the people who aren't downloading, ONLY want the downloaders to pay. Then people who wanted to buy blank DVDs would have to somehow prove that they're not downloading copyrighted material. In other words, you'll get an internet tap just so you could buy DVDs without a tariff? I don't think so. It sucks that you have to pay for something that you don't buy (your future self-manufactured music CD). But it's better than paying nothing and living in a 1984 society. And as I said, I think most blank media buyers are also people who download a movie or
* You could also say that it sucks that you have to "buy your privacy" but that's not the only area where privacy is an issue (the selection of who's paying). There's also the question of: "how do we select the person who's going to RECEIVE the money?". I don't know how they select that in the Netherlands at the moment. I know they're not wiretapping internet connections so they must be holding polls and get a statistical measurement on who gets the tariff'd money. It's good that they don't have to internettap me with this system but what about the "artists" who are being downloaded only by a small number of people? They're not getting an inscentive to produce more "works of art" because they're being downloaded but don't get any money for entertaining people. Maybe this is not the actual situation because they will be able
- -- Truth addict for life.
A month wait?
Heck, I had three when I was deathly ill in intensive care in a Chicago hospital in 1998. I would have surely died in Canada.
You could've hired me.
Remember also that Ch.11 of NAFTA states that any Foreign Corporation (say Apple) can defeat any domestic Law, if found to inhibit " property, ownership, the right to market and sell a product, and the right to earn a profit" by the foreign corporation.
.25 levy... well Apple gets to sue, especially if this law makes it unprofitable to sell (or unpopular).
So considering that Apple makes $.01-.02 cents a track, and now they want to charge
Apple will probably win, far more nefarious businesses have usurped popular Environmental law, so expect Apple to have a hay-day with this law.
Nope, the Canadian government is weak, so any unpopular laws are out, and even if it passed, I would expect Apple to sue under Ch.11 to have this law reversed.
As an aside, Ch 11 (IMHO) has largely been terrible for Canadians, so using it for our benefit would be nice. [Please don't cloud the issue with *DRM is good for you FUD*]
Bad spellers of the world untie!
Crop rotation is a great thing, but why force it on land owners?
You must apprentice for 4 years to become certified as a brick layer. Why force it on the people? Why not just let people lay their own bricks, and bricks all over town? Why go through any kind of government regulation if all it is is just laying bricks? Lets all just tell the Joe Schmoe's around town to start laying bricks, and when they all fall on Granny Smith next year and cause her to fall and break her hip and have a heart attack, we will just rebuild it like we did origionally... Nobody will feel bad because Joe Schmoe didn't know any better that he layed them in a verticle stack.. Then another brick wall falls on Joe Sixpack. But nobody really cares... He is just a drunk. Suddenly, all the bricks in town fell over and hit Dick and Jane, knocked down the neighboring house, cave in a grocery store full of Jills and Franks, and let all the small time drug users out of state prison. How about that? I bet you think that is a good idea to ehh?
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
Explain to me how this makes the US a "nice guy"? Where I come from, we call that "ripping everyone off".
I'll take a stab at this. Domestic demand in Europe and Japan is stagnating, Japan has been in and our of deflation for over a decade, Germany is toying with it. Germany is facing 12.6% unemployment right now the highest numbers since the thirties. Europe can't escape the massive future liabilities the government has amassed due to its low birth rates, and therefore has to import as much labour as it can simply to keep going. The threat of low-cost labour from the rest of the EU, and the curtailing of benefits that have come to be seen as a right threaten to harm the social structures of Europe in irreperable ways.
You've been paying attention only to people who say what you want if you really believe that there has ever been any chance of the Euro becoming a reserve currency in the world economy. Ireland even began issuing some of it's sovereign debt in USD a few weeks ago! Extrapolating this assertion and saying this was the reason for the Iraq war borders on voluntary lunacy. The US trade deficit has been nearly the only thing that has kept Europe and Asia from operating in a severe recession over the last few years.
Basically America's consumer, partially aided by the Fed's policy of low interest rates, has been supporting the world's economy. Economists have been wringing thier hands for years over how the world economy is running on only one engine. Part of the hope was that during this period Europe (really talking about Germany here, the largest economy in Europe by far) and Japan would reform thier labour laws, and banking system respectively, creating domestic growth and genuine domestic demand, and start to buy stuff not only from themselves, supporting thier own economies, but also from America.
Aside from the fact that the social structures of Japan and Germany, as well as the government leaders have pretty much failed to address the structural problems that have brought their domestic economies to thier knees while they had a chance. The consequences of this so far have been a falling US dollar, but could easily be protectionism, which is really unfortunate.
But that's just what I've grokked over the last few years. I could be wrong. But I doubt I'm more wrong than you in this case.
Kalin
Metamuscle.com - News in the Iro
You really think having the population of Japan and Germany ripping resources out of the ground, turning them into useful goods and sending them to the US in exchange for pieces of paper that are never redeemed is doing those countries good?
I think you're a little too close to the problem to see the big picture there mate. The people of Japan and every other nation would be a lot better off spending their time and resources to improve their own lot in life rather than improving yours.
And your dismissal of the Euro as a global currency are totally unconvincing and not based on fact. Countries hoard US dollars and swap them around as a global currency instead of redeeming them because other countries won't accept them, particularly where oil is concerned. If you can't see that having a huge source of oil like Iraq accepting Euros and removing that necessity to hoard US Dollars would have changed things, then there's not a lot I can say to enlighten you. It's an obvious chain of events. It was just swept under the table at the time... I mean, they were really there to get all those WMDs, right?
And that motive carries over to Britian, their major ally in that war. They were fighting very hard to put the breaks on the Euro at the time.
The current weakness of the currency that makes you so disparaging of the possibility is a
result of the invasion of Iraq. It would be a great deal stronger now if that war hadn't occurred.
The US are looking out for themselves. It's been an accepted fact among the ruling class there that their standard of living depends on exploiting other nations for decades, and that those exploitive power structures must be preserved.
Think I'm wrong all you like... but do even a little research and the pieces all fall into place. The changes that brutal dictator would have brought to pass would have gone a long way towards breaking the US stranglehold on the global economy and making the world a better place to live in. Too late now though.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
How about a better idea. Legalize industrial hemp. It doesn't deplete the soil, and you can make diesel fuel from the seeds. We could be paying US farmers to grow oil instead of invading foreign counties for it. We could be making plastic, paper, cloth, and hundreds of other usefull products from it.
The only downside to industrial hemp, from my point of view, is that I can't catch a buzz from it because it doesn't have enough THC to get anyone high.
TommyOpen Source for Open Minds
I think you are not fully taking the total interdependence of the global economic system into consideration. It is not to America's benefit in any way to see the economies of other nations collapse. Yes, it is in America's benefit to maintain it's leadership in innovation and wealth creation, but America is stronger, and in fact we all are stronger if there is more than one geo-economic center that is capable of taking up the slack when an economic slow down occurs.
Absolutely.
This is why the idea that we invaded Iraq to steal the oil (and sundry variations on this theme) is so absurd. We stand to make far more money by buying Iraqi oil than by just walking in and taking it.
With Iraq free, and prosperity growing, the Iraqis will do the work of pumping the oil. They sell it to us. We give them money. They spend the money. They buy Fords and Chevys and Dells and Levis and iPods. And we buy more oil. And they build factories, and start selling us denim and tyres and hard disk drives. And we sell them X-Box 2's and Caterpillar bulldozers and The Incredibles DVDs and Boeing 777's.
And round and round it goes. The whole point is, it's not a zero-sum game. Wealth isn't a pie you have to divide up among the people at the table. Wealth is a pie factory. The more effort you put in, the more pie there is to go around.
Mmm, pie.
We give them money. They spend the money. They buy Fords and Chevys and Dells and Levis and iPods. And we buy more oil.
Like Saudi Arabia? The we give them money and they spend it argument doesn't really hold much water because if you look at every OTHER country in the region that produces oil, you see the same thing over and over - rich oil barrons who run everything, and everyone else is stuck where they've always been. Perhaps with a democratic republic they can turn things around, but it's hard to say that it's going to turn out that way when everything points in the other direction.
'some leftie ecogroup says it's bad'
Interesting...you're saying that, lo and behold, the "leftie ecogroup" was actually right in saying that clear cutting was bad all along?
You think that's just some coincidence, or maybe that they actually know what they're talking about?
You don't clearly state it, so I won't accuse; but your tone is coming close to saying "Weyerhauser invented non-homogenous tree planting and has moved away from clear cutting because they learned it was bad for the land. Coincidentally, 'leftie greenies' have been saying the same thing for 40 years, but it's just luck that they had it right this time."
You think W would have ever even considered this strategy if it wasn't for the education and research that leftie greenie organizations and PhDs have done?
--
$tar -xvf