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Universal Wants a Slice of Apple's iPod Pie
vought writes "According to a Reuters report, Universal is now taking the precendent set by Microsoft's Zune and moving to force Apple to include a royalty payment with each iPod.
In the words of Universal Music's Doug Morris, 'These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it. So it's time to get paid for it.' Does Microsoft's precedent mean the start of a slippery slope that will add a 'pirate tax' to every piece of hardware that touches digital music?"
IIRC Canada has a system like this, where part of the purchase price of blank media goes to royalties for stuff that is assumed to be copied to it.
If they charged a fee for each device and let us have free, legal file sharing (since we paid for the content with our device fee) it sounds semi reasonable.
Of course that's not what they are talking about so...
Actually I have no problem with paying a small extra "tax" with the purchase of an ipod. BUT only if that means I can then fill my ipod 100% with pirated music...
If I'm paying the "pirate tax" to help them recover the "losses" they have from piracy, there's no problem then, right? If they are still going to sue my guts if I have pirated mp3s on my ipod, then why I am paying extra money with the purchase of an ipod? I'm paying them protection money and they still come after me? If they are going to act like the mob, they should at least do it properly...
Yes, we do, and thanks to it the courts told the CRIA (RIAA of Canada) to screw off when they tried to start the same litigation idiocy that is going on in the states right now. It's funny, the industry lobbied really hard to get the levy passed in the 1990's when no one had yet realised how the internet would change things. Now they are lobbying as hard as they can to get it removed so they can start suing people. Not having any luck so far from what I can tell.
"If the music cartels start charging me for music that I haven't downloaded, ripped, or otherwise pirated, then I'm going to have to stop spending money at iTMS and my local funky CD shop, and treat that "royalty charge" as a blanket license to their entire library."
FWIW I was in a band signed to a UK indie label during the 80's which was had licensing deals with pretty much every major label around the World. Then came the 90's and slowly but surely the CD's started disappearing off Tower Records' shelves. Then came the 00's and we get our own section on iTunes.
Needless to say if I'd bought my first MP3 player in the 00's I would have gone straight to iTunes and bought my albums from there, but instead I bought my first MP3 player in the late 90's and had to resort to grabbing un-licensed MP3's of my songs from wherever I could find them, basically because I didn't have the orginal CD's (my entire record collection is just that, records, and stored back in the UK) and I couldn't find CD's in used record stores.
If the record labels had got their shit together to build their own kickass online record store, and made their own kickass players so people could listen to them, Apple wouldn't have seen an opportunity and created iTunes and the iPod.
So FUCK YOU Universal, and every other label that starts crying about lost revenue.