Slashdot Mirror
Canada May Tax Legal Music Downloads
FuriousBalancing writes "MacNN is reporting that Canadians may soon pay a small tax on every legal music store download. This fee is the work of a measure proposed by the Copyright Board of Canada. About two cents would be added to every song downloaded, with 1.5 cents being added to album downloads. Streaming services and subscriptions would also be taxed, to the tune of about 6% of the monthly fee. Most interesting - the tax would be retroactively applied to every transaction processed since 1996. 'The surcharge would help compensate artists for piracy, according to SOCAN's reasoning. The publishing group draws similarities between this and a 21-cent fee already applied to blank CDs in the country; the right to copy a song from an online store demands the same sort of levy applied to copying a retail CD, SOCAN argues. The tax may have a significant impact for online stores such as iTunes and Canada-based Puretracks, which will have to factor the amount both into future and past sales.' The full text of the measure is available in PDF format."
"The surcharge would help compensate artists for piracy"
So now we are taxing law-abiding citizens to make up for those who break the law? Is it just me, or does this *promote* piracy?
Because of the health costs of tobbaco, Canada is proposing a new tax on non-smokers.
Well, I can't think of anything particularly witty other than 'FUCK THEM'.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
Because, obviously, charging more for legal downloads is going to help reduce piracy.
Just how do we get connected to this gravy train?
Can we just churn out some simple recordings, demonstrate it's theoretical pirating rates and call up somewhere to get some dough?
If they started implementing this, I would probably just have to stop buying music altogether. It's getting way too annoying for me to buy music without being ripped off by the industry. I use eMusic to buy my music, and if I had to pay this extra fee, I would cancel my account, and let them know exactly why. If enough online music stores had enough customers quit, then I think that the backlash from these companies would make the government change their mind about this kind of stuff. Also, trying to make things like this retroactive, would make it even worse. The industry complains that people are pirating music, and then hits their customers with crap like this. I've gone completely legit for the last few years, because I feel that it's right to support the artists, but stuff like this makes me want to go back to downloading everything over IRC. If they are just going to assume that we are pirating all their content, we might as well do it, because they certainly don't deserve our money.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
retroactive!?!?!
so Canada is going to send out a bill for 11years of back tax to every Canadian who down loaded legal music?
that should be popular.
-- Sig under construction...
Yet another backward step in the online music distribution saga. Those who are paying for music online have to pay a tax to make up for those who don't pay for their music. It hardly encourages the use of legal online music stores.
Another reason to download music illegitimately, its bad enough with DRM, Incompatible formats, high prices and slow getting it to the music store, so now you have to put up with the same amount of DRM, Incompatible formats, slower service and now higher prices, and how is a "Tax" going to help compensate artists? Same way that all the other taxes are going to help the "Roads and schools" when they don't. Just another reason to "pirate" songs
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
Has anyone ever followed up to see just how much of the 21-cent fee actually makes it back to the artists, and how much is sucked up by the record company cartel?
In related news, Canada proposed a tax on blank paper, by analogy to the sales tax which applies to books. "Someone might read what's written on the paper someday, and we won't then have the opportunity to collect the tax."
They should tax the illegal downloads, that is where the money is!
I would think (living on the other side of the globe) that online music sales, as every other kind of sale, included the tax in the price. So basically, this just means a little raise, today 4% tomorrow 5%. Is this the first time something gets more expensive like this in Canada?
Well, I'd hope that privacy was sanctioned by governments, but with governments being what they are these days...
Wait a sec, did you mean *piracy*?
Because the purchase of online music will be taxed, by downloading pirated music would you not be avoiding tax (i.e. tax evasion)?
A tax however onerous is one thing, but retroactive!? That's just plain mean! I would think it's time for our friends to the north to go to the pitchforks and torches!
A retroactive tax an ex-post-facto law. If this were the US, that part of the law would be unconstitutional on its face, article I, section 9, paragraph 3: "No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed." But of course, it's Canada, and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms only affects criminal retrospective laws (and section 33 can be used to obtain a 5 year mulligan if it is). BUT I AM NOT A LAWYER, so maybe I'm wrong (but I may be right).
Wow, thanks for the correction. I even proof-read the message before I posted it. So much for listening to [non-pirated] tunes while I type.
[sarcasm]Will there be a Tax on earbuds too? How about we have a per child tax of $50/year to account for music piracy, starting from birth, of course.[/sarcasm]
What is this crap? Canada needs to get their priorities in order. People are more important than lobbyist groups. I hope Canadians are voting for the right politicians, because if this continues any industry could just come up and say "People are downloading/using our material illegally, we need to be compensated." Poof, another tax! With so many copies of Windows pirated, I'm surprised that Microsoft hasn't been trying to get a piece of this cake.
So now they want my two cents worth as well, eh?
This seems like utter crap. First you tax blank media for artist compensation. Now you're going to tax legit web stores as well to protect artist compensation. This smacks of corporate welfare. Why should the people of Canada compensate companies for not being smart enough to make money and adjust to the market? There is always going to be music and entertainment in our lives whether there is a record company or media company behind it or not. It's part of our tribal heritage. The business plan they had in the 80s no longer work. Innvoate! Find a new way. Lately, we've been doing that a lot just about everywhere. This tax does absolutely nothing to benefit the people.
Worse, what happens after downloading goes down because it is no longer affordable? Or maybe piracy comes down? They'll still be paying that tax and the companies are going to get essentially free money. THis reminds me of the record "breakage" fee that record companies charge or the "convenience' fee that ticketmaster charge. Just pure profit. If these people want some windfall of the tax, then they should allow the government to look at how they structure themselves.
The only way is to completely boycott the whole thing and that should send a very strong signal to both government and record companies.
sri
... but more evil.
The music industry is trying to come to terms with the fact that they can't make money the way that they used to. Seeing that their traditional business model is approaching collapse, they need to either protect it or find a new business model. In this case the new business model is to get the government to tax citizens and give the tax revenue to the music industry. By encouraging more piracy, they will be able to demand more tax payer money down the road.
If you think that this is an implausible business model, just look the business of agriculture in most rich countries. Their business is to depend on government enforced price supports and subsidies, and very little about actual farming.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
I have mod points I would love to use, but I have no chance because no one is correcting the Myth of Piracy.
In Canada it is NOT piracy to copy a song for personal use. It is not stealing, it is not copyright infrigement. It is a right granted by law, a law that was encouraged by the music industry back in the Audio Cassette days. Yes, they now regret it... too bad!
If you go to imeem.com you can listen to practically any track ever recorded without actually paying anything directly to the site, instead the site is making money of advertising and has deals with the record labels to pay them a cut of thise. So I wonder if this would be taxed? No transaction is taking place in Canada, well except when canadian artists get paid their share I guess, but that's probably well beyond the scope of the law.
Illegal downloads are still free, right?
If you really want to make it fair, then if the tax is, e.g., 1%, just download one illegal song for every 100 you buy. Then you're paying for your own piracy, right?
It would be comparable, I guess, to SOCAN collecting a tax on CD purchases. The whole beauty of internet distribution is getting rid of (or reducing the number of) middlemen. This is destroying every incentive people have to *support the artist*, which seems completely against what the whole point of SOCAN was. So if I make a band and sell my music using paypal, do I have to write cheques giving 3% of my profits to SOCAN? What am I getting from them? How does this help the artists? How does this help the industry? *
Down with middlemen.
* "While no public responses have been made, the Copyright Board report notes that both Apple and the RIAA-equivalent Canadian Recording Industry Association were heavily involved in resisting proposed rates."
So even the CRIA's against it. Who the heck is SOCAN representing?
Didn't SOCAN recently try to get the levy on blank media removed because it legitimized music piracy? Now they want to add this tax? They seem to be directly contradicting themselves.
"Canadians may soon pay a small tax on every legal music store download, says a new measure (PDF) sanctioned by the Copyright Board of Canada. Requested by the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN), the tax would apply at least 2.1 cents to every individual song download and 1.5 cents per track for complete albums."
So... the people who pay for music are paying for the people who don't pay for music?
"The publishing group draws similarities between this and a 21-cent fee already applied to blank CDs in the country; the right to copy a song from an online store demands the same sort of levy applied to copying a retail CD, SOCAN argues."
This is clearly some new definition for the word "similarities", one that apparently means "the same general approach but completely misses the point". The idea of the CD levy is that the pirates who buy blank CDs end up paying money to the artists to compensate for the sales lost to those pirates who buy the blank CDs (not a particularly accurate approach but that's the idea). With this new levy it's the legal purchasers paying for the piracy while the pirates, who don't buy music online, don't pay for anything.
I seriously can't figure out how this is supposed to make sense, say for a moment you do need to charge a little extra on every online sale to compensate for piracy. You know what you do? Raise your prices!!
Does anyone have a clue how this is supposed to be a good idea? The only thing I can possibly think of is that a) the fee will hurt independent sellers more than CRIA aligned sellers (conspiracy), b) it's designed to be absurd to help kill the levy which the CRIA dislikes(conspiracy), or c) the story as reported by MacNN is inaccurate since I've never heard of them and was too lazy to look through the 65 page pdf(conspiracy or stupidity).
I'm anxious to hear any alternate interpretations.
I stole this Sig
So you get taxed for not supporting the music industry if you do support the music industry?
And you don't get taxed for not supporting the musics industry if you don't support the music industry?
Yes, this makes perfect sense! Thanks for this proposal.
I wholeheartedly support it. I can now much easier choose my proper action here and whether I should purchase legal music or not.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
SOCAN should apply for a surcharge on air, since it can be used to sing a tune of one of their composers.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Has anyone checked the math to see if the two cents on every digital download to compensate piracy losses match up with the thousands of dollars the RIAA quotes as lost in its cases?
...but everything to do with getting every cent they can out of law abiding citizens. I say screw 'em and torrent everything and then send the artists $5 directly.
Seriously, I'm sick of this shit. Everyday it is either a new scheme for squeezing money out of customers or falsely blaming piracy for bad sales of even shittier music. We're supposed to have the power since it's our money so let's exercise it! Stop buying legally and just steal it... they're all convinced that's all we do anyways so "When in Rome..."
At least Radiohead has a fucking clue.
There are only 10 kinds of people in the world. Those that understand binary and those that don't.
Although I am no fan of SOCAN, this definitely sticks it to the record companies. As long as these fees are in place, music piracy will remain untested in court. The current theory is that as long as the artists are compensated for illegally obtained music (aka burning a copy for you friends) they are not loosing anything when piracy happens. This reduces the real losses to artists, which is what piracy is all about (can you say someone stole from you if they are paid a mutually agreeable price through SOCAN, which SOCAN oddly decides is fair). CRIA/RIAA will not risk loosing in court and would prefer it stay a legal grey area.
Will artists who release music independently for download (like Radiohead's recent album) also be subject to the tax? As an afterthought, at least in this case the money will actually go to the artists
O Canada!
Our home and native LAN!
True pirate love in all thy lines command.
With glowing modems we see bits rise,
The True Bits strong and free!
From far and wide,
O Canada, we fileshare tunes for thee.
God keep our tunes gloriously free!
O Canada, we fileshare tunes for thee.
O Canada, we fileshare tunes for free.
This is exactly why I download everything I listen too. Paying a small tax on blank CDs isn't so bad, because it means i can legally pirate all the music I want to. because of that CD tax, my 8.4GB mp3 collection is perfectly legal. if SOCANs blank CD tax is 21 cents per disk, how is it that I am able to buy 50 blank CDs for $12? does that mean that $10.50 are taxes and a 50 pack of CDs should only cost $1.50? if that is the case, the rest of the world is being grossly rippped off for blank CD prices. another big problem I have with SOCAN: I used to work retail, and I would often play CDs my friend had put out over the store speakers. a SOCAN representative just happend to come in, and warn the manager that playing music without purchacing a liscenece would result in a rather large fine. I replied that my friend's made the music in their home studio, and they are entirely independant. not only that, but the band also paid the SOCAN tax on the CD. But none of that mattered to the SOCAN guys, aparently, you need a SOCAN liscense to play ANY recorded Canadian music, whether they are signed to a major or not. I ignored their request, and luckilly, they never returned.
-I only code in BASIC.-
I bet the sneaky idea behind this is to bust torrent users for evading this new tax.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
I'm thinking that, when future generations look back on this period of time, it will be known as "The Age of Unreason". Perhaps, given the number of attorneys involved in the ongoing fall of Western civilization it will be known as the "Shark Ages". Either way, it's really remarkable.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The proposed tax will tax companies like emusic, Amazon etc, and give the money to Sony BMG, Universal etc...
In short, a large cartel is trying to screw over the competition by lobbying politicians to create bad laws. This is pure corruption, and nothing else.
I am so glad that I have never purchased downloaded music and probably never will, besides I pay my share by way of the blank media levy.
Many have moved to work against this BS when it comes up, yet it still comes up again and again. The last one I could find through google:
http://www.ctf.ca/articles/News.asp?article_ID=2350
"""
The Joint Committee said that retroactive tax law detrimental to taxpayers is inappropriate for two main reasons: it undermines the rule of law and the confidence that taxpayers have in our self-assessment tax system, and it is perceived as being reflective of a tax system that is neither stable nor predictable and is thus an impediment to foreign and domestic investment in Canada.
"""
But, I gotta say that if I had purchased music online since 1996 and they told me to pay up, I tell them where to go. They can pry that money from my cold dead fucking hands.
Artists will see one thin dime of that tax money when monkeys come flying out of my ass. And I don't feel any monkeys down there at the moment.
We occasionally hear expressions of doubt from the music industry about this arrangement, despite having proposed it originally. If the industry now asks for the principle to be extended to downloads, then clearly it is underscoring its endorsement of the arrangement.
It's good to have this question cleared up, because if a legislative reversal were to take place, I'd want my money back. I buy CDs and DVDs exclusively for system backup. That's my data and yet I have to pay a copy tax on the media. Not that I'm complaining, just pointing out that the industry can't have it both ways.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
Why am I reminded of the notion of charging a tax to have a meal and another tax to take a dump?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I have to pay for the uninsured drivers. It would be nice to have them pay, but hey, since I'm here and it's enforceable...
FlyingPizzas.com, for the tasteful hermit
Maybe, but at least we can hold our liquor.
Since 1996? Y2K problem, where are you now?
The recording industry is going drive open source developers to write music engines that generate new music in any genre on the fly. That will put the last nail in the coffin of a dying industry. It's so sad it didn't happen suddenly. Now we have to watch this awful writhing and wailing.
What if it is a CD-R, or better yet, a whole burned DVD full of nice MP3 or OGG files?
What if people started leaving "extra" copies of discs laying about for the general public to find... is it ok to listen to them?
All babies born since 1996 now owe $222,000 in taxes to compensate artists for the probable piracy related to their existence.
To boldly use to and too two times and get it right too! They're not gonna believe their eyes when they see it there!
And, apparently, spell and write the English language.
Property is theft.
It took me a full 4 minutes to understand your statement.
And as a result iam stuck with a cookie in my throat which i swallowed whole...
In effect this tax means i can pirate the music???
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
We're all too busy doing real work.
Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. -Anonymous
I'm not sure who runs the "copyright board," but taxes and levies of this sort usually have to pass through parliament before they are approved. It's good to know that our elected representatives have our best interests in mind when they pass ridiculous legislation like this. It proves that not only do they have incredibly short-sighted perspectives into the issue, but that they are also hypocritical to their own "conservative" ideals.
Being Canadian, this only makes me more and more inclined to forgo legitimate purchases and just download DRM-free songs illegitimately acquired. At least with the levy on blank CDs, there is a limited presumption that music will be distributed without purchased rights, but now they want to tax everything purchased on proper terms. In spite of the fact that we are only talking a matter of cents, symbolically, this is a kick in the face for online distribution.
So, I would like to thank the major labels and the government for giving yourselves a good, swift punch to the nut-sack. It is, if anything, entertaining.
There's an error in the OP, the place is called Canadia (cuh-nay-dee-uh). Jeez.
My webcomic
How exactly would they do this? Bill customers again? Charge it to a Visa (against the Visa terms I believe)? Taxes are usually pushed to the end-user... but it's pretty hard to collect from the end-user years later...
The music industry is working overtime to give itself a bad reputation.
They really should not be using piracy as an excuse to hide their own acts of robbery from artist.
such acts only beget more of the same
Artists should wake up and realize this and dump the traditional music industry.
The more I see this sort of disgrace going on the less likely I'll buy from any label.
The traditional business model doesn't work any longer as the reasons for the mechanics
of it to have been the way it was no longer exist. There is no reason anymore to subsidize
new artist and risk with the profits made from successful artist. New artist can establish
their own following via the internet, they don't need traditional promotion at that stage of
business. Once they have a reasonable following then they are in a position to take offers
and decide on the best offer. Rather than relying on chance and taking abuse.
The technology we have today can really help to put competition back into the music industry,
if only the old worn out business model would get the fu& out of the way with it pathetic
effort to continue its existence.
What is the new business model? Well Ted Turner went up against established News Networks
and and created His own model that was better than the traditional model.
Who has the resources, courage and knowhow to do it?
Thats the question that who ever answers it is going to certainly earn the wealth they will obtain.
Senator: What good is electricity in the home?
Not a Senator: Sir, in 20 years, you'll be taxing it.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
thesbian (thes'pe-an) adj.
1. Female thespian who prefers the company of ladies.
Because there's no such thing as passive 2nd hand smoking. (And by the way, most of the example you gave aren't associated with strong addiction. Workaholic doesn't have the same biochemestry implication as cocaine or tobacco).
By engaging a random risky behaviour, you're only endangering your self. With smoke, your also compromising the health of bystander who never got to choose to smoke.
Note that, it the long string of example you gave, there are a couple of situation where 3rd party could be endandered by the behaviour : if risky sport involves heavily tuned cars on non-closed roads, if alcohol drinking involves driving, etc... And you know what : those situation happen to be illegal (exactly because a non-consenting bystander could get harmed). Technically tobacco should be the case too.
The doses needed to endanger 3rd parties are actually very low and stay suspended in the air for quite some time. There's a lot of recent research data showing that the effect of 2nd hand smoking have been ignored in the past (or that the tobacco loby managed to disctract attention efficiently).
No matter how much you refuse to believe them, the fact happen to be there.
Passive smoke kills too.
On the other hand there are other such endangering behaviours that should get attention too, but smoker are the current popular one because they're conviniently to pick on :
- it's proven that its bad for the health and everybody does know it.
- it's not anymore done by almost everyone (whereas producing pollution by driving non-ecologic cars is much more difficult to criticise because everyone is doing it and no one wants to admit he's guilty too).
- smokers are dependant. whatever to tell them and nomatter how much you piss them off, they'll still smoke, thus the tax cash flow will still come in.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Is it just me or does it seem crazy that they are trying to tax something that you don't actually own and never bought? What's next? An air tax?
Tax them 6%!
FRA: STFU GTFO
Why don't the record labels just add 2 cents to their wholesale download prices?
For blank recordable media, the CRIA has no ability to affect pricing directly, thus the tax on them.
...Or should I say "almost escape", since the CRIA has evidently returned fire.
For legally purchased music, the CRIA defines the price, via their contracts with individual distribution channels.
Thus, if they see the need for an extra $0.02, they could just, y'know, raise prices by that much per download. No need to go through the government and needlessly complicate the issue.
So, why phrase this as a tax?
Scarily obvious answer: This has more to do with Radiohead than with piracy. Piracy scares the music industry, but not nearly as much as artists like Radiohead, Issa (née Jane Siberry), and NIN finally figuring out a viable way to escape the industry's evil clutches.
We are already helping to cure that by having Bush brown-noser Harper as Prime Minister.
From the Financial Post "Copyright might follow U.S. model":
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/printedition/story.html?id=375efc16-3e14-488d-915e-b880fae33d4a
I am surpeised that there hasn't been a thread on this.
Has a nasty habit of taxing vices and hobbies, movies, cigarettes, alcohol etc.
These things are expensive here earning us a reputation as rather more reserved then our American neighbors...
People buying music have money to spend on the "trivial" arts... I suppose this is a product of the fall of communism and rise in conservatism but it still rubs me the wrong way. It seems fair and like a good tax base but big picture attacking the arts is a bad thing tm.
"Piracy" might be higher in Canada than the US. Certainly the RIAA and MPAA would like us all to think so.
In part, that's because of an unwritten compact. The article mentions that blank CD's have been taxed in Canada. They don't really explain viscerally how heavily.
Take a look at these two products from the same retail chain -- Best Buy -- in Canada and the US. The Canadian dollar, to everyone's astonishment, is about $1.02 US as of this writing, i.e., worth a little more than the US dollar. So dollar to dollar price comparisons are reasonably fair.
In the United States, if I want to wander into Best Buy and pick up a 100-pack of Maxell CD-R's I'm going to pay $32.99 as of this weekend.
The same retail chain, in Canada, the same product... $69.99.
(By contrast, a Maxell 50-pack of DVD-R's is 19.99 in Canada this weekend, regularly 31.99, and 30.99 in the US).
Not, of course, that I recommend Best Buy as a store or Maxell as media. Just easy quick comparisons.
That's right. In Canada this weekend, you'll pay more than double for CD-R's than in the States, and, at least for DVD-R's purchased from Best Buy, about two thirds of what you'll pay in the States.
The difference goes to the music industry and, ultimately, artists.
So Canada has this unwritten compact whereby everyone who purchases CD-R's is assumed to be using them for copied music and pays a hefty tax.
And, in turn, so far the courts have been highly resistant to industry attempts to get ISP's to divulge who's at what IP. And downloading... stuff.
I don't suggest that the two are directly connected, but there is probably a moral connection in more than one person's mind and more than one judge's mind.
The industry, of course, hates this.
People who used CD-R's for backup have, not surprisingly, moved on to using DVD-/+R's, and don't really mind.
Personally, I lean to the view that the sensible way forward is to charge a Canadian CD-R type levy on personal internet usage, and let people do what they want. You might even make it something people can opt out of, but if they're then caught downloading music/video without permission of the copyright holder, they get hit with a full-blown RIAA legal assault. And fair enough then. They had a nice easy way to legally comply and still do something that socially is very popular... and they chose to break the law.
Make legal (monitored for market share) downloads so compelling and interesting that the illegal alternatives fade away.
True, we can simply treat it as piracy and let the *AA continue to sue people, but that didn't work very well in the case of people taping programs on VCR's.
This move, though, to tax legal downloads is just plain bizarre as others have suggested.
Making the public pay for the misfortune (or misdeeds) of others is a classic Socialist concept and is hardly new to Canada. Look at their national health care. Anybody can get care "for free" because the public in general pays for it... if, of course, they can get care at all. Often they can't. I expect that if implemented this system will work approximately as well, which is to say, not very.
The average smoker will spend several TIMES as much in taxes as the averge non-smoker, as nearly HALF of a pack's price in Canada is pure taxes. That's 3-5$ on every 5-10$ pack going straight to the government. No product in existence has as much taxes - not even gas, which is only about 35% taxed!
Smokers, in CANADA, pay MORE than their healthcare costs in taxes.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
If you want to compensate musicians for piracy by taxing potentially uncompensated transfers that are stored on CDs and MP3 players, OK, I can see that. I could even see a tax on internet access to compensate copyright holders, similar to the CD tax. But taxing *legal* downloads that have already compensated the copyright holders instead? That's penalizing the activity you want to promote, and encouraging people to trade "under the table" instead.
What idiot came up with this?
The existing media tax in Canada compensates the industry for the legal right of users in Canada to copy material for their own use.
But are they charging a tax on pre-recorded CDs... in case, um, he guy who downloads it makes a copy. Or something?
If not, then how the HELL do they justify this? It's got nothing to do with a right to copy, because the copyright holder has ALREADY been compensated for the download. It's completely unrelated to the media charge because a download isn't media.
I think I figured it out.
This is a hidden import duty, a tax applied primarily to non-canadian musicians but paid primarily to canadian musicians.
Looks like they've come up with a loophole in NAFTA, GATT, etcetera...
It just occured to me what is actually going on; they're taxing floor.
The problem is that we already have taxes on the storage medium e.g. CD's, HDD, etc. So, these companies are already compensated through the storage mediums at Puretracks, etc as well as the storage mediums for each and every client. But this, this is like taxing the wire rather than anything else, given that it's specific to downloading.
So, the real world equivalent is like taxing the floor of a record store because that is the transmission medium (i.e. the client walks to grab the CD/etc, to the cashier and out the door) in a store.
How asinine is that?!?!
IMO, this is just more evidence that there should be an age cap on, education required for and experience in the field for, the people who propose such laws/taxes/etc. Because IMO, these people are so very obviously completely out of touch with how things actually work, that they should be forced out of the decision making process and these requirements would at least make the situation better.
Perhaps you mean a different thing than I do when you say "science."
One little nit to pick: No, we are not under British rule in any way, shape, or form, we merely acknowledge our history.
No Comment.
A few more nits to pick:
:)
1: While still a member of the commonwealth, Canada re-did its constitution under Prime Minster Trudeau, so that the Governor General (the Queen's rep in Canada) is no longer answerable to the Queen in the same manner. Therefore, Canada is no longer under British rule.
2: the original settlers of Canada were from Asia, followed by the ones from northern Europe. The French showed up and settled on the east coast much later, around the same time that the Spanish set up settlements on the west coast. Luckily for the French, the Asian settlers on the east coast were by and large peaceful, so they were able to take their land without too much resistance. Unfortunately for the Spanish, the tribes on the west coast were warrior tribes, and wiped out almost all the settlements. Eventually the French co-mingled with the native peoples, and migrated west to Manitoba. At this point, the French sent another colonizing group, as did the British. The two fought soon after, and both sides claimed victory -- but the British gained most of the land.
The main part of what is now Canada was actually owned by the Hudson's Bay Company and the Northwest Trading Company, not by a country. The Hudson's Bay Company bankrupted Northwest and bought their land for a song, after which they sold it all to the British government to consolidate their assets. The British government then abandoned it as being too costly to maintain, so when MacDonald & Co. were looking to expand Canada to the west of Manitoba, they were able to annex it for virtually free.
Meanwhile, the British had colonized Vancouver Island and Cascadia. Vancouver Island arranged to be bought out by Cascadia for the price of a rail line to run right from the south end of the island to the North. After agreeing to this venture, Cascadia, which the Queen had renamed British Columbia (after losing some of the colony to the US in the form of Washington State) discovered that Vancouver Island had been on the brink of bankruptcy and carried a huge debt. Canada wanted to control all land north of the 49th parallel, so came to an agreement with British Columbia to connect it to Ontario by rail -- what they didn't know is that British Columbia was about to declare bankruptcy itself due to the combined debts of VI and BC.
Much Much later, the last of the colonies, Newfoundland, joined Canada in 1949 after its government fell apart and Canada took over the role of defence during WWII.
3: There are still large French speaking communities all across modern-day Canada, with the largest being in Quebec and Nova Scotia, followed by Manitoba and Ontario. Quebec has French Cultural protection built into its provincial constitution.
Of course, I read the GP's post as being one part flamebait and one part humour. But as you've pointed out, so much was SO wrong that a bit of education was needed
One thing I forgot to mention: the rail line on VI was never completed -- in the late *19*80's, the island agreed to amend the agreement so that a highway would be built instead -- the highway was completed as far north as Campbell River in 2000.
Canadians keep proving there worth. There ideas are revolutionary and they continue to revolutionize a lot of things. For them to tax legal music downloads does not surprise me, how else would they be able to provide free health care.
Change brands, and you can get a 50 pack of Verbatim CD-Rs for $22.99 on sale this week. Personally I'd rather just order online from www.blankmedia.ca for $34.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I'm still paying $46 for stuff I can get in the states for $32. (And no idea if Verbatim are better or worse than Maxell). My point remains: Canadians pay a lot more -- frequently close to double -- for CD-R's.
Sure, I can pay less still from blankmedia.ca, and I can pay less still from a US blankmedia retailer. That's not the point; the point is to try and compare apples to apples what prices for the same goods from the same retailer in both countries are like.
-Holmwood