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Canadians Overpay Millions on Copyright Tax
An anonymous reader writes "Michael Geist has up a post on his site about the Copyright Board of Canada's decision last week on the controversial private copying levy, which functions like a tax on blank media. The good news? The Board reduced the levy on certain media such as CD-R Audio, CD-RW Audio, and MiniDiscs. The bad news? The millions of dollars in overpayment from these media will go into the pockets of manufacturers, importers, and retailers, not back to the consumers who paid in the first place. 'In addition to the overpayment issue, the decision contains several interesting revelations ... the decision sheds some light on the CPCC's enforcement program. The collective has aggressively targeted those parties that do not pay the levy, with 21 claims over the past three years. In fact, the enforcement program has been so effective that the Board found that concerns about the emergence of a gray or black market for blank CDs has not materialized.'"
Sounds like a good business, but who is going to buy a HUGE CD when alternatives like SD chips are much more portable and more resistant to abuse? Who buys cassette tapes anymore? Is the decline of reel to reel tapes and vinyl due to piracy?
You need to have a good business plan. Don't blame others for your lack of technological vision.
So I wonder if there's no tax on DVD-Rs. And if not, why not?
Last year I got 100 DVD-Rs for $25. At 25 for 4.7GB there's not much incentive to even buy CD-Rs if the tax alone is 21 for 700MB.
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
Sales of vinyl have been increasing year-over-year for the last 10 years according to several music mags. It is a small percentage, but it is increasing.
The millions of dollars in overpayment from these media will go into the pockets of manufacturers, importers, and retailers, not back to the consumers who paid in the first place.
Right, always finding something bad even in a good news, aren't you Mike.
How on Earth would this "return in the hands of the consumers" be organized. How do you imagine the logistics of such an outcome. Maybe you bring your receipts and they give you 1 cents for each disk or something?
What they did is the best they could do. Manifacturers/retailers/importers get back the money and they can pass the savings on to their future customers.
Of course they won't, since it's not how business works, but that's a completely different matter.
I, for one, give you those 2 cents and not look back.
n/t
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
So we pay a little more for CD's, and that money goes to the copyright holders (we hope).
Umm, maybe this isn't such a bad idea? After all, there is a TV Tax in the UK for the same reason. Everyone complains about it, but not *that* much.
Maury
The collective has aggressively targeted..
Who wrote this? Am I going to be assimilated?
h
Valkyrie is about to die! Wizard needs food -- badly!
Lets make a deal.
Here is an alternative - Ive been seeing the origional one pop up so regularily that I am surprised no one else has messed around with it yet... - I had to... appologies to the copyright holder of this much used piece, this derviative is intended as a parody...:
My business faces ruin. Software sales have dropped through the floor. People aren't buying half as many products as they did just a year ago. Revenue is down and costs are up. My store has survived for years, but I now face the prospect of bankruptcy. Every day I ask myself why this is happening.
I bought the store about 12 years ago. It was one of those little software stores that sell well known, major software releases that everyone uses, even the people that don't them. I decided that to grow the business I'd need to aim for a wider demographic, the family market. My store specialised in family software - stuff that the whole family could use. I don't sell sick stuff like violent games or gambling simulations , and I'm proud to have one of the most extensive education sections that I know of.
The business strategy worked. People flocked to my store, knowing that they (and their children) could safely purchase software that worked without coming accross profanity or violent games. Over the years I expanded the business and took on more clean-cut and friendly employees. It took hard work and long hours but I had achieved my dream - owning a profitable business that I had built with my own hands, from the ground up. But now, this dream is turning into a nightmare.
Every day, fewer and fewer customers enter my store to buy fewer and fewer titles. Why is no one buying software? Are people not interested in compters? Do people prefer to use pen and paper, outsource;? I don't know. But there is one, inescapable truth - Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) is mostly to blame. The statistics speak for themselves - seven in ten webservers now run F/OSS. On The Internet, you can find and download replacements for thousands of dollars worth of software in just minutes. It has the potential to destroy the software industry, from lower management, to upper management to stores like my own. Before you point to the supposed "economic downturn", I'll note that the book store just across from my store is doing great business. Unlike software, it's harder to make F/OSS books and distribute them over The Internet.
A week ago, an unpleasant experience with these F/OSS'er communists gave me an idea. In my store, I overheard a teenage patron talking to his friend.
"Dude, I'm going to put Debian on my PC instead of this Vista junk, I'll download it right away."
"Yeah, dude, that's really lete [sic], you'll get lots of respect."
I was fuming. So they were out to destroy the software industry from right under my nose? Fat chance. When they came past the counter to leave, I grabbed the little shit by his shirt. "So...you're going to use unamerican, communist F/OSS replacements to good honest god-fearing proprietry software and tell your friends about it, punk?" I asked him in my best Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry voice.
"Uh y-yeh." He mumbled, shocked.
"That's it. What's your name? You're blacklisted. Now take yourself and your little bitch friend out of my store - and don't come back." I barked. Cravenly, they complied and scampered off.
So that's my idea - a national blacklist of F/OSS'ers. If somebody cannot obey the basic rules of society, then they should be excluded from society. If F/OSS'ers want to give stuff away for free, with the source code and divert cash from the software industry, then the software industry should exclude them. It's that simple. One strike, and you're out - no reputable software store will allow you to buy another title. If the F/OSS'ers can't buy the software to begin with, then they won't be able to make alternatives and give them away free over The Internet, will they? It's no different to doctors blacklisting poor people from access to non-emergency medical care.
The Grey Market in Canada, at least here in Montreal is pretty weak for any sort of goods. People don't seem to grasp the concept of depreciation and try to sell used goods at new prices and aren't open to negotiation. Considering the inflated retail prices relative to the US (which is only a half hour away)and insanely high sales tax (15%) one would think that the grey market would thrive.
just wait for some illegal immigrants to read what you just said.
Read radical news here
How about a copyright moratorium for a month?
In order to compensate consumers for overpaying, we can download and copy anything we want royalty-free.
If it works out well, we can do it every year.
Don't forget: copyright isn't your enemy, RIAA/MPAA and organisations like them who abuse copyright, are.
As someone who produces something worthwhile myself, I don't want everything I did copied around for a month, thanks.
Michael Geist has up a post on his site
He set us up the post?
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
I've seen this note being circulated for, I think, 5 years now. It doesn't get better with time, actually, it gets more and more pathetic. But even as a cookie-cutter template "think of the small record store owners" tear-squeezer, lemme take this opportunity to answer. Once, and for all.
First and foremost, when you invest in a dying business, you're the only one to blame if it goes south. The CD market is dwindling. Copying may play a role, but the bigger problem is that music and clothing, which has been for ages the only stuff kids and teenagers waste their money for, have to face serious competition in cellphones, computers and the gadgets (ringtones, games,...) for them. Music and the containers for them (records, tapes, CDs...) are no longer the only ones who try to lure teenagers into spending.
Second, when you aim at a certain demographic, make sure they have money to spend on your stuff. Families don't. More and more families today have less and less spending money. Also, show me at least one family that sits down together at home to listen to some CD instead of, say, watch TV. IF, and only if, they do anything at all together.
Third, a "national blacklist" won't do jack. Welcome to the world, pal. You won't sell to Mr. Copy? Ok, then he won't buy anything AT ALL anymore but copy everything. In a nutshell, it means that you will sell LESS. Not more. People don't fear paying a few thousand bucks to the mafiaa when they get sniffed out, you think they'd get their panties in a knot for not being allowed to take a step into some store anymore?
Btw, I don't consider the atrocity that the copyright laws have turned into "basic rules of society". It takes at the very least a good, specialized lawyer to actually understand that bullcrap. If those are the basic rules, what kind of lawyer does it take to understand the more complex ones? And what do they govern?
War on Piracy... Good idea, I personally dread sailing in the vicinity of Manila, it gets really, really dangerous there... but what the heck does this have to do with the topic?
And, seriously, if your daughters can't go to college, blame yourself for choosing a dead horse to bet your money on.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
We pay that "copyright mafiaa tax" too, but that doesn't mean we actually may copy anything. We still are not allowed to remove or circumvent copying restrictions to actually execute our right to create a backup, we still have no right to actually burn copyrighted content on those media, so I wonder what this "tax" is based on.
In fact, we pay for nothing.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
How on Earth would this "return in the hands of the consumers" be organized.
By suspending the levy entirely until the overpayments have been made up for.
Sales of vinyl have been increasing year-over-year for the last 10 years according to several music mags. It is a small percentage, but it is increasing.
True, but I haven't noticed a change in the number of joggers running down the street with phonograph players in their hands.
This levy saved the future of a friend of mine. He did use it as a defence in court that since he payed the levy on the cd's he buys and the HD's he used that since its done the time he thought it was alright to do the crime. The judge bought it because well its true, we have paid for piracy we might as well enjoy it. To be honest if we over pay a little into the system so much the better, it just give more fuel to the "But I've alriady paid for it" defence.
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
I have mixed thoughts on this. This levy was charged to the manufacturers/importers/retailers, right? The consumer made a free market exchange here. They thought the price was fair for the product, and they paid for it. Why should consumers get reimbursed?
If the government retroactively reduced corporate income taxes for last year, should consumers expect checks in the mail for all of the purchases they made? These are all business costs that factor into the price.
Now don't get me wrong: I completely disagree with the purpose of the levy to begin with. But I'm not sure how consumers must necessarily be the ones to benefit from this. Kudos to the corporations that do pass their relief onto their customers, but I don't understand how people are jumping to the conclusion that there's a legal obligation to do that.
It might have made more sense for them to make the adjustment, and simply deduct it from future sales. Consumers get "reimbursed" by virtue of (hopefully) lower prices in the near future, until the surplus is exhausted.
*He* doesn't have the funny notion, our stupid government does. Because yes, he is correct, they don't charge the levy on the larger, more useful dvd blanks, so they obviously think they're "different" some how.
May I say welcome to the nanny state! I am all for out healthcare system, but the government in this country goes way too far to try and prop up our "culture" and things like "multiculturalism". It goes from annoying to downright infuriating knowing my tax dollars prop up crap like this. It's just another bureaucracy that is useless and yet is held up as some kind of icon for social responsibility like the gun registry.
And download enough to cover the overpayment. Consider it like a credit.
Folks, let's just step back for a second. I have never paid the levy on media here in Canada. Why? Because the retailers I buy it from refuse to pay it. Go shop at your local little computer store, or even at London Drugs, where they do not pay the levy and refuse to do so, simply because of this reason! The levy exists, but to my knowledge only fools are charging their customers the levy, and only fools are paying it.