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Canadian Copyright Group Wants iPod Tax
soulxtc writes "Unable to define memory as a 'recording medium,' Canada's Private Copyright Collective goes directly after portable music player devices, memory cards, and anything else that can be used to make private copies. The PCC submitted a proposal to the country's Copyright Board that suggests levies of $5 (Canadian) on devices with up to 1GB of memory, $25 for 1-10 GB, $50 for 10-30 GB, and $75 for over 30 GB. If approved, this propoal would increase the price of a 30-GB iPod by 26%. These collections are intended to compensate artists and labels for the losses they suffer when people 'illegally' copy or transfer music. The PCC is also seeking a new $2 to $10 tax on memory cards. The backbone of digital photography has become tangled up in the fight for making sure music companies get every nickel and dime they feel that they deserve."
Is have a true sliding scale. Under that pricing scheme, the 1gb ipod has a $5 tax, while the 2gb model has a $25 tax rather than $10. Sheesh.
So, this means that I get to download anything I want while in Canada free of guilt and cost... right?
It's good to know that the record industry in the US aren't the only thugs in the business. Yeah, let's just assume everyone is a crook and charge them up front! The greed of these fuckers is absolutely endless.
Is anybody else up for a Canadian Tea Party?
Do they want me to stop buying music? If I am going to be charged for buying a new iPod, I should be able to download at least as much music as it costs for the fee right? If they are going to accuse people of being thieves, then I suppose they have no choice but to stop buying music completely and just pirate it. Way to go CRIAA. Have fun with bankruptcy.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Is the fee you currently pay on blank CDs considered a license to burn whatever you want?
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Eventually, if this tax is approved, the entire weight of the tax is going to shifted onto the consumers. Why must the consumers be punished by the same people they're purchasing music from? And people wonder why I never listen to/buy new music these days.
These collections are intended to compensate artists and labels for the losses they suffer when people 'illegally' copy or transfer music
No, they're not. They're intended to set up yet another cash cow for large recording companies, irrespective of whether individuals put legal or illegal copies of music on their recording devices.
And no, they're not intended to supplement the compensation of artists, regardless.
Geez, that was easy to translate. The recording companies don't even try to hide their intentions behind competent PR any more.
Kythe
habeas corpus?
I know musicians who can reproduce a musical score after only one hearing. Are we going to find a way to control them? What's more - they have virtually limitless memory.
Someone call someone before the fabric of society is torn!
memory cards are the backbone of digital photography and they want to add $2-$10 to them.
I know it's too much to expect people to read the articles linked here, but could you at least read the entire summary?
The PCC is also seeking a new $2 to $10 tax on memory cards. The backbone of digital photography has become tangled up in the fight for making sure music companies get every nickel and dime they feel that they deserve."
...considering that you could fit maybe 250 128 bps mp3's on a 1 GB iPod (that comes to about $.02 per song), I guess we know now how much people should be penalized for illegal music sharing.
Kythe
They've also been sounding out the idea of a levy on hard drives.
My brother is a full-time professional musician in Alberta, and has been now for about 20 years. It's not an easy job, but it's his love and his passion.
He's now been an artist on about six albums over the years, one of which was nominated for a Juno. Why, pray tell, has he not gotten a single bloody cent from this tariff?
If I didn't know better, I'd almost believe that the point of it isn't actually to reward the musicians! But of course, that's just crazy talk.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
state-sanctioned anal penetration!
It's a Canadian tradition. Why else would we legalize gay marriage?
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
The members of the RIAA and the Canadian equivalent will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Ah, fuck it. Why wait for a revolution? Everybody get your guns and we'll meet down at the bar to plan our attack on these useless leeches.
-- Will program for bandwidth
The Private Copying Levy is what lets me download with impunity in Canada. The dollars may or may not actually get to the artists (google away on this one), but it certainly does facilitate my p2p activities.
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I don't know who the 'Private Copyright Collective' is, but this position is at odds with what we've been hearing about the Canadian Recording Industry Association's position - last heard as wanting to do away with the levy:
http://michaelgeist.ca/component/option,com_conte
I think this is an interesting tactic: collect levy at the front end, squeeze the availability of material via p2p networks through increased DRM on released materials.
Quite honestly, I don't really notice the levy at my pocketbook, and it does make for an entirely different legal landscape for p2p downloading. Michael Geist is the Guy in the Know about this landscape in Canada - check out his blog at the address above, there's reams of material there.
[17] Leary, T., White, C., Wood, P. R., Bhabha, W. D., and Wirth, N. Lambda calculus considered harmful. In Proceedings
If they think this is a good deal, then why not make it part of a package when one buys an iPod? Spend an additional $5 for your 1GB iPod, and you get a contract that says you can download as much cartel music as you want, from any source, to that device.
For people who want to go the iTunes route, they could simply turn down the contract.
Sigh. Something tells me the fact that they're trying to legislate this means they wouldn't go for my idea. Not enough free money in it for them, I'm guessing.
Kythe
How do I contact the organizations making these proposals? I want to give them a piece of my mind, namely to tell them they can't have it both ways:
1) Make unauthorized copying illegal.
2) Charge me for it.
Do they want a compulsory licensing scheme, as has been proposed by The Register, or do they want people to pay for each copy of music they purchase.
They should make up their damn minds, because they can't have their cake and eat it too.
This space left intentionally blank.
I have a better question: If this becomes Canadian law, does that mean that Apple's iTMS and other MP3 stores start providing their content free to Canadian individuals, but start charging the labels/artists per song?
Eat the Path.
Seems like local versions of these interest groups in other countries, are lobbying for similar taxes. sometimes they get away with it, sometimes they don't. The all have the same thing in common that they lack any form of PR skills. :)
D =175201
There have been a game going on for years here in Europe, fx in Denmark the price of a blank CD or DVD were at one point 5-10 times higher than the same product in Germany. So of course people would just buy a spindle when on vacation og ordering it on the internet and save a lot of money. I believe that the price today still is like 3 times higher in DK. about 1$ for 1 DVD.
Example in Danish and Kr. http://www.edbpriser.dk/Products/Listprices.asp?I
(se) eq. online shop in Sweden. (de) eq. shop in Germany. fragt=delivery, pris=price, total=price incl. delivery.
The shop in the bottom are a local/national shop, hence the 3x price.
So all they gained from the tax was that everyone who aren't stupid, are buying their media in bulk from abroad. and then they get 0%. Even when I bought a DVD burner in a store they advised me not to buy the DVDs in their shop(they also only had small selection even tough it was a huge store), but order them online from Germany instead.
that the recording industries believe that all they have to to do make money is to make more laws?
Why don't they try something novel like oh.... selling a product to us?
I say we pass a law that everyone that buys a crowbar has to pay me a nickel, to make up for the losses I incur every time someone breaks into my house. ya.
Idiots. No, I take that back. By saying that I'm just insulting the idots and that's not fair for even them.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I always did find "innocent before proven guilty" to be rather ineffective. Why not just calculate the average of criminal activity among the whole population, and incarcerate each person for the amount of time found in the result? Think of the money that could be saved when the courts are closed down.
For each 700mb cd-rw, the levy is 30 cents.
A 30gb ipod has 30000mb-
30000mb/700mb = 42.9 cdrs
42.9 cdrs x 30 cents = 1286 cents = 12.86 dollars
The association better have a very good reason why they want to charge for than 3x for the ipod compared to cd-rws.
Also, why stop with ipod? I can record information on harddrives too! Let's see, a typically hard drive in a computer has 250 gb. Obviously, if a 30gb ipod costs $40, a 250gb computer should cost (250/40) x $40 = $240! We all know computers are the main source of illegally downloaded mp3!
I agree that these taxes are ridiculous - $75 being quite a hefty price increase - however, if this is a replacement for record companies suing random 12 year olds for $5000, I can't say it's totally bad.
"Making files available on the web is brodcasting"
Americans don't seem to grok that one. "Sharing" to them extends to handing out a copy to every resident of the planet.
A few years ago some countries in Europe adopted a similar taxing on media-carriers and media. The problem is that not a single musician or even a record label sees any of the money. The state forwards it to this 'non-profit' organization and recently a 'scandal' quickly buried by the media came out that actually in over 3 years, millions of euros have been collected and none have been paid out. It also came out that the employees of this 'non-profit' organization (similar to RIAA) had salary's exceeding 250k/year.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I think the suppliers of blank media make a greater contribution to the economy and the tax base - and really shouldn't be victimised because some loud tax dodgers with good lobbyists want a special tax to feed themselves and drain from another portion of the economy.
Goverments are not supposed to be fee collectors for private companies - they are supposed to work in the interest of their nations.
What happens in 5 years? Is the scale the same so that a 1GB memory card is $5.10? The government isn't going to keep updating the law yearly. Eventually everything will have the maximum tax as memory capacity fully goes into the highest taxed end of the scale.
I've seen it before, but I've never quite understood how any government can be convinced to collect taxes for a non-government enterprise. Unless the government is now going to start producing, regulating or in some other way getting involved in the music industry, and intends to use the taxes to pursue that enterprise, why exactly would they collect taxes for it? -- I know it's slashdot but this is a serious question if anyone knows [seriously though - I know it's slashdot, but please refrain from the corruption/collusion arguments for at least 3 posts... ] [[no, seriously... ]]
Never quite understood how these levies/tariffs are distributed back to the artists.
... and then burn it all on a CD for my car driving pleasure ... how does the RIAA know how to distribute the funds to the starving artists in this case ?
... money from my pocket ends up in hers anyway ?
.. for a fee of course.
So say if I download a few songs from groups such as Blood-Axe, mix it up with a bit of psy-trance from Finland, and then round it out with some Pendulum
What, they dont ?
So you mean despite the efforts of the original muso's involved, plus my time to mix and burn the CD - they just end up writing out yet another cheque to Celine Dion for all of our collective efforts ?
Fuck No !
Ive never wanted to even to listen to Celine Dion. Not ever !
But when I step into an elevator, or pass through a shoe shop - there she is, singing in the background and generally ruining my day.
I dont want to listen to her, but yet she still gets royalties out of me when I make my own CD, or backup my harddisk ?
That is so totally around the wrong fucking way. Man - I should be PAID by Celine Dion instead as compensation for HAVING to listen to any of her music, which is clearly against my wishes. She infringes upon my personal aural liberty, and yet
That is just WRONG on so many levels.
Seriously - does ANYONE go the effort of actually downloading Celine Dion music and burning it on CD's Why ? So they can hold hands with their so-called 'friends' and dance around and be silly between glasses of cheap wine ?
What they should do is just stick to selling normal CD's and iPods and things without the tarriffs, but give people the right, if they so choose, to pay $100 and get a licence key that will put their CD Burner or iPod into some sort of crappy 'Celine Dion Mode'. In the same way that you can take a perfectly good PC, and pay $400 or whatever it is to stick Vista on there - enabling 'Celine Dion' mode on the iPod will virtually trash the machine, in exchange for getting the 'Wow' of having it play Celine Dion songs
The iPod should just operate normally, unless you 'opt-in', and pay the fee, after which the iPod degrades itself to the point where it will play Celine Dion music. 'Look Herbert, my iPod it now plays Celine Dion !!'. 'Yayy !'. 'Hey Clarence, your iPod - its turning a pale shade of Green !!'. 'Its all about the Yayy !!'.
Its just WRONG
Next thing you know they are taxing paper (since I can hand-copy, or even xerox, copyrighted material), pens (Devil's instrument), headphones and speakers (cheap bastardic broadcasting equipment) and parrots, and they'll find a way for the Government to pass a law stating that airwaves qualify as comercial goods and so the more you get, the more copyrighted content you are stealing, you nasty little thief.
Oh, and you better start forgetting how to hum. We'll tax that too.
My 0.02 cents
That $100 HD will now cost $150. Nice.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
We had such a levy on iPods and other "recordable media" a few years back, it was struck down and collected levies had to be refunded. Now this organization wants to put the levies back (and expand them).
At the same time, the Canadian Recording Industry Association (think Canadian RIAA) is lobbying to eliminate fair use rights in order to "harmonize" with the US's draconian copyright system (the same harmonization that fucked over the Australians when they signed their free trade agreement with the US).
The attempt at double-dipping is truly mind boggling; it's depressing that no one in power cares.
What they should be doing is taxing bandwidth. If your cable company offers "up to 3gbit/s of bandwidth", you should be able to download up to that much of pirated music per second. So it would make more sense to tax the bandwidth! The math comes out as...
3gbit = 375 megabytes of data per second
I saw a quote of $0.30 per CD, which comes out to $0.16 cents per second, or roughly $414,720 per month in piracy taxes.
Dekker Dreyer
The memory card levy part of this is utter bullshit. Fuck this pisses me right the fuck off. I DONT buy new music or download it. I DO download music from cd's I already own which by the fucking way I buy at a pawn shop for $2/3 dollars. NOW I do take tons of photos with my Olympus E1. I fucking will not be forced to pay some shitty ass music artiss wages for the pleasure of storing MY OWN COPYRIGHTED photos from my camera onto a memory card.
And who the fuck stores music on memory cards? I dont have any links to data that will show this but I'm prety sure and everyone know this that sales of memory cards for digital cameras beats the sales of memory cards for music players by a long shot.by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
...I should legally be able to walk right up to any artist and kick them in the nads.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If I read this correctly, the people wanting these taxes also want to tax memory cards of a sort that work in MP3 players but are more often used in digital cameras. What should the digital photographers do, if this law is passed, when their current stock of memory cards runs out?
And if hard drives get taxed, what will you do when your current HD dies?
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
...and I might be willing to pay the fine.
Seriously, there is no evidence at all that the labels (almost all American, btw) will actually give a dime to the artists on top of their existing contracts.
The "standard recording contract" pays the artist an upfront advance that is recouped from the royalties (usually a meager 12-14%, some of which may go to the engineer or the producer). IF and ONLY IF that advance is recouped in full (and record labels have tons of accounting tricks to assert that even a million-seller didn't "recoup") will the artist actually start seeing real royalty payments come in. (BTW, through all of this and beyond, the label owns the music, not the artist.)
There is nothing in the artist contract that actually has allowances for when extra "fees" collected on behalf of the artists of the label actually is applied to the payment of the advance. There is nothing in the accounting systems of a record label that will actually distribute such collected fees back to the artists of the label, either as cash or as applied to the advance.
The label keeps the money, most of which is either pure profit (it didn't cost them anything except paying the lobbyist) or at least is applied to the "general fund" which is used to pay the advance for the next standard artist's standard contract, and the legalized slavery continues unabated.
Unless the law goes against the labels as well, requiring that they show proof that they have changed their contracting and accounting systems to actually give an acceptable cut of this income to the artists, then all that has happened is that the legislation has totally bought into the lies and deceits of the music industry, and is sanctioning theft of both the artists AND the consumers.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
If you are a manufacturer or importer, you can avoid the levy entirely on your products as long as you record some sound on the media before you sell it. The sound recorded on the media can even be erased. Clearly this is not an option for CD-Rs, but for devices that include a hard drive, simply recording a sound on the drive and then erasing it exempts the drive from the levy. This is because (as the legislation now stands) "blank audio recording medium means a recording medium, regardless of its material form, onto which a sound recording may be reproduced, that is of a kind ordinarily used by individual consumers for that purpose and on which no sounds have ever been fixed..." MP3 player manufactures could just preload some music onto it, and no levy for them! It's especially good for Apple then, that the Apple v. Apple thing has been settled.
Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.