Slashdot Mirror
CRIA Admits P2P Downloading Legal in Canada
An anonymous reader writes "Michael Geist is reporting that the Canadian Recording Industry Association — the Canadian equivalent of the RIAA — this week filed documents in Canadian court that seeks to kill the expansion of the levy on blank media to iPods since it fears that the system now legalizes peer-to-peer downloading of music in Canada. CRIA's President Graham Henderson argued in his affidavit that a recent decision from the Copyright Board of Canada 'broadens the scope of the private copying exception to avoid making illegal file sharers liable for infringement.'"
You've got it wrong: the government thinks that it is *not* illegal to copy music for personal use. The levy gives me the right to make copies of music for my use. Period. Nothing illegal about it. And why shouldn't it be legal? Why should the government support one or two particular delivery methods, rather than letting me get the music any way I like, as long as the artist gets paid?
Unlike the US version of the levy, I don't need to copy onto levied media. Copying anywhere is fine. The argument for this is that the levy can be expanded (and there's currently a motion to expand it to the iPod, which is what the CRIA is objecting to).
But do note that this applies only to music, not to movies or games. No levies paid to them.
Here in the U.S., we pay a 2 percent royalty on all medium capable of storing and playing back music.And we've been paying it since 1992, when the "Digital Audio Recording Technology Act" was passed.
However, our Congress hasn't set up a legal link between the paying of that tax and our legal rights to use the devices in any ways that exceed thing on which we don't pay a tax.
It seems that in Canada you have that right attached to a tax. Hm - being taxed for something and gaining a benefit. How novel!
While it is legal to download, distribution (upload) still isn't, therefore leaving finished torrents of infringing material continue uploading once the download is complete would be a liability.
Look at this from a different angle. There are no drift net style copyright law suits clogging up the system.
Copyright owners are always stealing from the public by extending copyright beyond what it was intended for and putting DRM on media that does not expire when copyright right runs out.
Are they going to expand this levy to cell phones as well? Mine has 2 gigs of memory and I use it all the time as a music player. There's also my hard drive and all the other components that store music information on my computer and play it back, will there be a levy on that as well. Then there's radio receivers and internet access itself...I think it's time that major record labels realize that they are no longer needed. Aside from the sparingly relevant music that they put out there, they only exist to exploit their artists and their customers. I have no pity for any hardship that they encounter.