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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 am not so sure that Canada's collectives want to "kill the download
industry" as much as they are still upset about the United States
failure to comply with the WTO ruling on the Byrd Amendment. In fact,
on March 31st of this year Canada put this out:
"The Government of Canada announced today that it will retaliate
against the United States in light of its failure to comply with the
World Trade Organization (WTO) ruling on the Byrd Amendment. Following
extensive consultations with domestic stakeholders, Canada will impose
a 15 percent surtax on U.S. live swine, cigarettes, oysters and
certain specialty fish, starting May 1, 2005"
Seems to me this download tariff is just another retaliation like the
above. It isn't just Canada either, several countries are upset that
the US has not complied.
For those that don't know, The Byrd amendment, passed by Congress four
years ago, provides that when foreign manufacturers are found to be
dumping goods in the U.S. market -- that is, selling at unfairly low
prices -- any anti-dumping duties that are imposed can be handed over
to the U.S. companies that brought the dumping case, rather than to
the Treasury. It has benefited U.S. firms in industries including
steel and pasta, with one of the largest beneficiaries being Timken
Co., an Ohio maker of bearings, which collected about $40 million last
year.
--greg Vulcan quiescent... Q: What machine shutdown with this message?
And 7% of gross revenue from hamburger sales since it's been shown that copyright violaters eat them, and 11% of posters of 70s rockers in cheesy poses since their images retain valuable copyrightable money-making potential, and 3% of the sale of every wheelbarrel since they can be used to haul off copyrighted material, and 1% of every breath you take since that's part of a copyrighted song lyric...
The whole point of the tariffs were to collect funding based upon implied piracy. (IE tariff's on blank video tapes because blank tapes were used to "illegally" copy movies and broadcast NFL games and such)
But, at least in the case of iTunes, you're already PAYING for the product. So there's no need to tariff it because the product is being legitimately purchased.
(Of course, that won't stop your friendly government from figuring out how to tax you...)
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
It doesn't stop with the cited sources either, this proposal has an extremely wide scope. From TFA:
SOCAN's proposal does not stop with music download services. The new Tariff 22 also calls for a tariff of 15 percent of gross revenues from both audio webcast sites that feature content similar to conventional radio stations as well as from established radio stations that webcast their signal. Moreover, gaming sites that communicate musical works as part of their games face a potential tariff of ten percent of gross revenues. In fact, to ensure that no one escapes Tariff 22, SOCAN envisions a tariff of ten percent of gross revenues for all other sites that communicate music.
Ultimately, this is all a bunch of legal poppycock. It's a proposal, and I'd argue that it's a damn stupid, untenable proposal. We need to let the Canadian government know that its a stupid proposal, but I have a feeling that they'll see it for what it is. After all, they've ruled positively in downloading cases before - what with our tariff on blank media.
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
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 can't see it killing these globally, just in Canada.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
But thats 25% Canadian so its less than 25% American.
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.
They should tax the illegal downloaders. Then again 25% of 0 is... um... uh... get back to me.
Are they gonna start driving across the border for cds then? Maybe we can get an exchange going!
Zoeith
In France all blank writable media is subject to a special tax. The proceeds of this tax are distributed to the various copyright agencies. The idea is that since they are going to be used to rip music or videos anyway, the copyright holders should get some compensation. Uterly silly, but it has been effective since the first blank audio cassettes arrived on the market....
Will this produce a negative impact on any Canadian artists such as k.d. lang, barenaked ladies, Celine Dion, Avril Lavigne, etc., etc.? We can only hope...
Viral software licensing is not freedom, it is in fact GNU/Socialism.
I mean, honestly. I don't know a single person who's ever BOUGHT a song online. Absolutely everyone I know has a ridiculously huge music collection that's come from napster, bittorrent, kazaa, morpheus, winmx, you name it. Anything but an officially sanctioned music site.
There's no incentive for us. We already pay a tax on our blank media, and downloading and uploading music are perfectly legal in Canada. Somehow I don't think that the online music companies are going to be shaking in their boots at all.
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.
"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
No, that is net profit.
Out of the $.99 they want $.40.
It is even more ridiculous in that at least in the US, $.70 on average already goes to the various copyright holders.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
Title says it all. This is a proposal from SOCAN, which represents some Canadian musicians. It's just a proposal. As long as the government is still collecting the tariff on blank media, there's no way this would ever actually happen, because organisations like SOCAN are *already* receiving funds as anti-pirating compensation.
The government's already decided that the blank media tax more than pays for lost revenue from the artists, and I doubt very much that SOCAN et al. will ever be willing to give that up.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
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
Repeat after me: Indymedia is not a source of respectable economic research.
Your arguments are big on grand sweeping statements but short on details and evidence. I'm afraid you're playing your hand as someone who has not looked deeply into competing explanations for what is going on. Seriously, can you point to any large-scale flight to safety from US treasuries to other currencies or assets? It just isn't realistically happening. Do you really think that some scheme cooked up by Chirac and Hussein to sell Iraqs meager oil output in Euros would have been likely? Do you honestly think that this fairly insignificant move would cause the trillions of dollars in treasuries held as a reserve currency to be liquidated in favor of Euros? Do you have any idea how momentous that move would be, and how massive events that have triggered a change in global reserve currency have been in the past? Are you actually suggesting that Saddam Hussein had a great beneficient financial program for the world?
Occam's Razor my friend, look into it.
Some sort of Baran-Wallerstein type theory of global immiserization is not "an accepted fact" as you claim, but actually widely discredited. Because post-war Germany and Japan, South Korea, Canada, all the greatest trading partners of the US are not 'exploited'. I'm sorry, you lose, move away from the table.
Look, I can tell that you're not going to be convinced by anything anyone says about this that doesn't fit your world-view, but I'm going to give a simple analogy for anyone who might stumble across this discussion. If you buy stuff from me, I prosper more than if you don't. If I am Germany, and I have stuff for sale then I am better off if people buy my stuff. If no one offers to buy it, then I have less money to spend on things I need. It would hurt me, as Germany a great deal if suddenly the US started trading with me less. OK, that's not too hard to understand.
Yes it would be good if Japan was also buying more Japanese goods and services and Germany more German goods and services. It would also be nice if Japan's banks weren't supporting billions upon billions of bad debt, and if German firms weren't regulated out of hiring new employees in defference to those who already have jobs. Having high exports, built on the back of American sovereign and consumer debt hasn't made these problems worse, but it may have forestalled their domestic resolution. It certainly isn't good for the long-term in America to have such high debt and low savings, but that's the price you've got to pay when you're basically supporting the world's economy. The alternative of allwoing Japan and Germany to sink into depression is too harsh for everyone.
BTW, I don't live in the US, not that I see what difference that makes, I thought we were discussing ideas here.
Metamuscle.com - News in the Iro