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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.'"
To our dear neighbors to the North, since your government seems to think it's OK to just assume you're all breaking the law anyway, and charge you accordingly with the extra price on blank media, you might as well do your best to get what you're paying for. Fill those torrent queues with music, movies, and games you already paid for with this levy!
;)
Also, if you don't mind, keep seeding when you're done
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Rationalize this: I'm PAYING a levy on hundreds and hundreds of CDs containing my own data, and I've used perhaps a handful of CDs to store music copied from my own, purchased music CDs (i.e. mix CDs).
Who is stealing from whom again?
The private copying levy exists on the premise that people are paying to allow for certain types of private copying. The law excludes some activities (e.g., if you copied music from any source and then started selling it -- illegal), and allows others (e.g., if you borrowed a music CD from a friend and copied it for your own personal use -- legal). It still makes distribution of music illegal, and, yes, as far as I know, it doesn't cover software or DVDs.
It's my personal decision that even though it is legal in Canada to do some types of copying thanks to the private copying law and the CD levy, I still buy my music. Why? Because I think the levy deal sucks for the artists. They get hardly anything (even less than normal), and the agency involved in distributing the money can't properly account for what people actually buy (i.e. the popular artists are the only ones likely to see much).
But would I be on a firm legal grounds if I did decide to exercise the rights granted under the private copying law? Absolutely yes. I'm paying for it. So, shut up. It's the record companies that are being inconsistent here by lobbying for the levy in the first place, but still claiming that people making any kind of copy are "stealing" music. No, in many circumstances it is already paid for. In Canada, if Billy loans Jane a CD to copy it is NOT stealing, it is entirely legal.
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!
Yes. And it's panic that the cash monster they created is coming back to bite them.
Look, it's a really silly idea that the incumbent group gets a government/taxpayer subsidy to make sure they stay in business, particularly when that group is nothing more than a middleman between the customer and supplier (musician). It's bad from the standpoint that it doesn't encourage efficiency in that middle layer and that stems from the fact that there is no competition.
But that aside, the government and middlemen decided they should get a subsidy in the form of a tax on blank records. That way everybody says "We all know what blanks are for, and that's to copy music, so we'll tax you and we don't have to sue people, etc etc". So everybody is happy. Music can be copied around, and while it's not perfect, it keeps the money going to enough place that the middlemen are happy because they get billions for doing nothing, and people are somewhat happy because everybody acknowledges that for the tax they get to copy music around.
Except the fly in the ointment is that less and less people actually burn to a CD. CD's are clumsy because of their limited capacity, and so people want to take 100, 1,000, and 10,000 songs with them. And it all goes onto a media where there's no tax. Worse, people are trading songs from all over the world via P2P there's no control over how quickly music gets copie,.. so the government in it's limited imagination says "no problem, we'll slap a tax on iPods and all is good". Except that it means the iPod levy, besides bringing less money proportionally to the record companies, also fully legitimizes P2P in Canada. To which the taxpayer says "Of course it does. You get your money, so you have to acknowledge that this is fine. At long last, the record companies (a.k.a. "the Middlemen") finally see the trap of their own doing. In accepting the fee all along they've legitimized the concept that non-profit copying is okay.
And since they've accepted the premise of "copying okay as long as we get money", they have no philosophical argument that P2P is wrong or hurts artists. And now the only thing we're arguing about is the price. From their standpoint, they feel they're owed $10,000 per iPod, except they know they would never get that. At most a few hundred. But even then, people would just come south and buy in the U.S.
So they've lost the argument in Canada. The only thing left is for them to crawl back into their hole and figure out how to make the musicians pay for all of this.
I find the way the Internet is slowly cutting up the record companies fascinating, and it will be interesting to see how they either adapt or die in the next decade. My bet is on "dying", but we'll see.