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Canadian Songwriters Propose Collective Licensing
aboivin writes "The Songwriters association of Canada has put forward a proposition for collective licensing of music for personal use. The Right to Equitable Remuneration for Music File Sharing would legalize sharing of a copy of a copyrighted musical work without motive of financial gain, for a monthly fee of $5.00 applied to all Canadian internet connections, which would be distributed to creators and rights holders. From the proposal: 'File sharing is both a revolution in music distribution and a very positive phenomenon. The volunteer efforts of millions of music fans creates a much greater choice of repertoire for consumers while allowing songs — both new and old, well known and obscure — to be heard. All that's needed to fulfill this revolution in distribution is a way for Creators and rights holders to be paid.'"
My first thought: This is like taxing the postal service to deliver copied works. How is that supposed to work?
And they *say* they'll distribute the funds, but that hasn't seemed to work in the past. Why is this going to work now? Someone needs to realize this can't work in practice.
I like the base concept behind this--rather passes by the whole RIAA bullfertilizer, but I dare say that many people (who will, doubtless, claim to be 'upright and upstanding citizens' or something like that) will whine about how "I never would share music! Why should I have to pay?"
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Try $5.03 the Canadian Dollar is stronger than the US Dollar.
Rightholders, NO!
Ed
I suggest you check on the exchange rates. It's pretty even now. Definitely not what you're saying.
Remember all that news about the U.S. dollar falling in the global market and all those morons were talking about it? Yeah, well, it actually turns out to have an impact in you making fun of how poor Canada is.
My work here is dung.
Either file sharing is intrinsically legitimate or it's not. If it is, then there is no reason to impose this $5 tax, it it is not, then introducing any form of compensation won't make it right either.
\u262D = \u5350
Where have you been for the past 4 months? The Canadian dollar reached parity with the US dollar on September 20th last year. It closed above parity a few days later, and peaked at around $1.08USD on November 7th. It's been no more than a few cents above or below parity since then.
Problem #1: There is always someone judging which band/group/artists get into the system, and who gets left out.
Problem #2: Whoever collects the money has an automatic monopoly. No competition means the monopoly can take a bigger cut of the profits.
Problem #3: This creates a problem for new or up-and-coming groups. They often get their exposure by offering their music, or samples of it, for free. Fewer people will hear them when the cost is the same as more established groups.
Rent Seeking! Everybody else does it!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
Old news from early December 07. Even remember seeing it in the firehose.
I'm not so sure a flat rate is the right way to go about things. Is it really right to treat all musical works as equal? If a few people consider a work to be of great value, isn't it worth as much as if a larger number of people consider a work to be of reasonable value?
Who decides which creator gets which piece of this pie? The Canadian RIAA, or the Canadian ministry of culture? Either way, is there any reason to assume their money allocation will be anything similar to what music consumers actually want?
-- Support a free market in the field of government
The general idea is great, but implementation details matter. I doubt the average Canadian house spends $60/year on music, so the $5/month is excessive. The other thing that caught my eye was this:
Who are these mysterious people waiting in the wings that have been spying on everyone? Media Sentry? The same clowns who would tell you that 98% of all online music is "theft"? Most artists should say, loud and clear, "no thanks" unless they can trust the monitoring company to honestly report listening. The industry has that has so long given artists the shaft should be discarded. Everyone else should say, "no thanks" to having all of their internet traffic monitored.
The obvious choice between earning a living by song and dance and personal entertainment or liberty is liberty. Today they want to listen, tomorrow they will censor. The trade off is not worth while.
I can't see something like this ever getting off the ground in the US, but if it were to do so, I'd happily pay $60 / year to be able to download all the music I want. Its nice to see that someone out there is beginning to understand how revolutionary the Internet is becoming not only for music distribution, but for just plain old finding new stuff.
I know I'm just anecdotal evidence, blah blah blah, but not only have I not bought a CD in years (the distribution part), but just about everything I listen to nowadays is something that I never would have managed to get my ears on without the Internet. I'm finding music through Wikipedia, myspace, Amazon, iTunes, and other outlets that I would never have heard 5 years ago. Plus I'm blessed with the option in many cases to be able to purchase it right away.
Even beyond just finding the music in the first place, I can also keep up with news, concert listings, merchandise, etc. whereas only a few years ago, I was completely in the dark about any of that stuff. The upside of combining the Internet with music is just too big to not invest in it.
Have enough social fees on my utility bills already.
It is so totally stupid that this is even been contemplated. The best part, it likely will not get past the government, they don't like competition.
So who gets a share of the money? Who is legitimately a rights holder? How do you divide the money?
Currently hooked on AMP
More like $5USD
I'd like $5/month from every internet connection in Canada too. Also I'd like a Ferrari and a Lear Jet.
It's hard to see this as anything but a blatant money-grab. Lots of us use Internet connections for reasons completely unrelated to music; why should we be forced to pay for that? What next, another $5 for the Canadian version of the MPAA, plus $2 for TV shows? Then $5 for the BSA? Another $5 for copyrighted books, and another $5 for comic books?
Funny, I get to pay for something I already have? File Sharing music is already legal in Canada.
So, everyone pays even though only a small percentage do it? Then the Porn industry will want their $5 next, and then the Movie industry, etc.... This could get expensive REAL, I mean REAL, fast......Just sayin'......
Say Grandma has an internet connection, and uses it only for sending email. She lives on a fixed income. Why should she pay $5 a month to subsidize other people so they can get free music by violating copyright? For someone on a fixed income, another $5/mo bill is a significant hit. Maybe that's $5 she could have spent having lunch with her bridge club at IHOP.
Basically the problem is that copyright is unenforceable, and a majority of the population feels no moral compunctions about violating it. (I happen to disagree with the majority, but that battle is lost, and it's time to move on.) How exactly does it follow from these circumstances that every single member of the population should be forced to pay a subsidy?
Realistically, the music industry is going to have to shrink. Boo hoo. There's no law of nature that dictates that x% of GDP should be spent on recorded music. A hundred years ago, nobody had recorded music, and the only way you got to hear any was either (a) by making music yourself, or (b) going out to hear a band. Then there was a long period where the default way to get music was to listen to commercially produced recordings, you didn't get much choice because the distribution channels (radio and LPs) couldn't cater to the long tails, and the record companies made out like robber barons. Now we're entering a new period, where the record companies have no legitimate function, and the distribution channels can cater to the long tails. It's just a change that's dictated by technology. The good news is that even if the industry shrinks, cutting out the middleman could actually increase remuneration to artists. We don't need a tax to make that happen.
Find free books.
Don't watch and-or listen to the State Of The Gulag Address.
Thanks for your opposition to the world's MOST dangerous person.
Cheers,
K. Trout
A really like this idea, and I would really like it to work, right up to the point at which they have to decide how to split the money. Who decides how much everyone gets? I can't think of any fair way to do this.
However, if they are seriously suggesting this, that means they might be up for some other system. How about a system which lets you download as much as you like and registers what you download? Still charge every $5 for it, and if you make it easy enough to use, people would use it instead of pirating, just because it is easier.
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
Not today. The Canadian dollar closed at $0.9958 US, so CA$5.00 would be US$4.979.
Except there's people making music outside of Canada, and this seems to exclude them. And more importantly, there are other forms of copyrighted material rather popular on P2P services, and this quite obviously give the creators of those a giant "fuck you". (And if this is meant to provide compensation for Canadian artists, shouldn't I get an exemption from this because I don't listen to any of them?)
Why only music? Let's add movies for another $5, because they copy them as well on the internet. $10 more for TV shows (hey, pay-per-view is expensive). I heard they pirate Operating Systems, so let's add another $15 for free Windows and MacOS sharing. And they even pirate expensive CAD applications, let's add $25 for them... Soon no one will be able to afford the internet anymore, only because every creator of intellectual property wants to be subsidized instead of competing in the market.
Being sentenced to pay a 5$ penalty for a crime I might commit in the future is just wrong.
I thought we still lived in a world of innocent until proven guilty. Guess I was wrong.
Besides, corporate greed won't stop there. Soon we will be paying $5 per month on Internet Connections, $2 per CD blank, and then still be expected to pay $30 for a retail music CD. Anyone care to guess what that ads up to in a year.
All for the benefit of SOCAM. No thanks.
I'm moving to Canada. If I can churn out an album a week I should be swimming in money before I know it.
deus does not exist but if he does
It's hard to avoid slippery slope arguments here (will movie companies be seeking their own share of the pot? what about music producers and musicians themselves?). It is hilarious how this fee would appear to go on forever and how it would be distributed -- I could easily see non-copyright songs falling under this proposal. These people to assert -every- song is available via P2P... so one can wonder why such songs aren't available via 'legal' means, such as iTunes. Could it be these same songwriters are putting up barriers to songs being available legally, and expect compensation that people aren't just willing to pay anymore?
I've had enough of this, NO! I don't give a crap about a copyright holder's renumeration. I give a damn about the renumeration of the artist. Just because some bloody monopolistic company has forced artists into joining them or die doesn't mean i should be forced to hand a penny over to these people- They're not providing a service they've just wedged themselves in between the consumer and the artist and have constructed a massive road block, saying to the artists "give us your copyright or no one will hear your music ever" and saying to the consumer "pay us or you'll never be allowed to hear music again"
Probably the same way the blank media levy is collected/distributed: lump sums given out to the songwriters' and musicians' guilds, which is then distributed by the guild on basis of need. Quite a fair way to do things, really, and one that the majority of Canadian musicians support wholeheartedly.
I agree with the proposal with one caveat: it shouldn't be applied to *all* internet connections. Just the so-called "high speed" ones. Anything 1mbit and over. Anything under that isn't fast enough to make filesharing worthwhile. More importantly, you can get a "high speed" connection in Canada that's 128kbit or 256kbit. For surfing the Internet or checking your e-mail, it's plenty fast enough. Even a 1mbit connection, which is one step above the entry level, is plenty fast enough for surfing and e-mail, and a lot of people will choose these slower services because they are priced much lower than an actual high speed connection.
We shouldn't be applying a levy of $5/month to a dialup Internet account that, itself, only costs $2.95/month, especially when the purpose of that levy is to combat a practice on the Internet that the $3/month connection simply isn't capable of. I'd happily pay an extra $5/month on my 7mbit cable connection, however, if it got rid of the legal grey areas surroudning file sharing. (how it's legal for me to download, sorta, but illegal for me to upload, for example)
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Big distributors get their cut, fine. But now there is less money to spend on artists directly at concerts and CD sales. It is probably not so great for artist friendly distributors like http://magnatune.com/ either - although they would have a better chance of fighting for their (and their artists) share.
Based on actuarial tables I have 41 years left. That's 492 months. At $5/mo that's $2460. I don't get to decide who gets that money - I can't reward the good groups and slight the bad ones the way I want to. Sure I can still go to concerts to support the ones I like, but with free money rolling in for sitting on your butt it won't make as much of a statement to not go to a concert.
To me, this sounds like a case of the majority of copyright holders realizing they won't ever be the top 10%, and wanting to grab a slice of someone else's pie.
Richard Stallman proposed a scheme like this in 1992.
The controversy at the time was Digital Audio Tape (DAT),
but the issues are the same. See The Right Way to Tax DAT, at
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/dat.html
I love clear concise Canadian thinking.
Pay a small flat rate, download all the music you want. I like it.
Of course, I think it should be optional, and if you're caught downloading music without paying the fee, you deserve to get raked over the coals (now that an alternative exists).
In the alternative, I'd be just as happy if they started a repository of music, with a $5 monthly access fee, and had all the music in losses mp3 and ogg. I'd win, because I'd finally have a legal method to sample music, and they'd win, because $60/year is much more than i currently spend on physical media.
Just none of this DRM'd, restricted, only-one-label crap.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
I have no problem with paying this disguised tax, as long as they set up free access to all their work. And for 60$ a year, it'd better be high quality and DRM-free.
If they don't agree to my demands, I won't agree to theirs. They can go hump a camel for all I care.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
What about the three separate connections; two DSL and one cable, that I administer for remote locations to the business I run the network for? I have the firewalls and proxies set up to stop employees from downloading music and video, so should I have to pay $15 per month for a "service" which I am, in fact, expressely forbidding the networks to access?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
oh wait, we did that... and they still complain.
For example, the US copyright board is considering setting a new standard royalty rate for recordings. I think this is the money owed to the composers for each song sale. The board wants to raise the rate from the current nine cents a track to twelve, but the RIAA is arguing that it should actually be reduced to six cents.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
So how is it they're going to figure out how much money to distribute to each copyright holder? I guess you could try some massive AI that sniffs all internet traffic, identifies copyrighted content, and tracks who's stuff is shared the most, but that would probably cost about $4.99/internet connection. Maybe they're just going to give all copyright holders the same amount. In that case, I think my parents have a wonderful recording of me singing when I was 5, which I should clearly be the copyright holder on. I can have it posted on my website (hosted in the US but accessible in Canada) in a minute or two. How do I tell the Canadian government where to send my check?
...would be to tax bicycles and skateboards. Most people that pirate media are young and they use bicycles and skateboards to carry around their CDs, USB keys, and ipods.
Too bad you still have to pay ridiculously high prices compared to us on stuff like electronics. That must suck since our currency is about the same, huh?
I think it should be optional but very easy to use.
Make it easy enough and $5/month beats piracy.
Also payment should be by the number of downloads.
Not difficult to track and more effective.
This would mean that the small guy would get paid just like someone with a big label ... but, oh, if the small guy goes with an indy label realising that the indy labels generally take a smaller %age cut than the big labels, hmmm, that looks like a sensible move ... hmmm, won't some of the better known artistes do the same, hmmm, how many artistes will the big labels have after a while ?
How soon before the big labels are complaining about this ?
Ahh. You begin to understand the meaning of "socialism". By spreading the cost out among everybody, rather than just the people who use the service, you can reduce the overall cost for everybody. Kind of like how our medical system works: I'm 26 years old, and I had knee surgery in November of 2007. Before then, I'd never been in the hospital, but I'm still paying for the public health care as part of my taxes. Because I'd paid that health care in my taxes, however, my stay in the hospital for the knee surgery (ACL, Meniscus, and shaving a fracture on the underside of the patella that never healed properly) was completely free. Didn't cost me a dime. Nor did the painkillers I got (and never used after the day of the surgery).
It doesn't matter that you aren't using that functionality. By charging you a small amount of money, it reduces the overall cost for everybody else.
You do realise that Canada isn't a capitalist state, right?
Besides which, they may choose to implement it only on residential services. *shrugs* If you have a "residential" account and are using it for "business" purposes, one has to ask the question: why aren't you using a "business" account? I'm in that boat, too, btw. I have a DSL connection and a cable connection. I do all my hosting off the DSL connection, and my personal uses off the Cable connection. I still think it's a good idea.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
So who gets a share of the money? Who is legitimately a rights holder? How do you divide the money?
Exactly. That's the problem with these schemes. They end up diverting revenue from the small artists to the large 'rights holders.'
Screw it, just let the Internet do what the Internet was designed to do: make copies.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
I would have no problem with this proposal, provided the following responsibilities were imposed:
1) Transparent accounting of disbursements; every month, the collection agency would have to show how much money was collected, and how the money was disbursed.
2) The collection agency must not favour one industry over another; copyright is copyright. It makes no difference whether the copyrighted item is a bunch of bytes representing a work of music, movie, animation, literature, source code, etc. The disbursement scheme must include all copyright rightsholders.
The problem isn't imposing a levy on Internet connections. The problem is who gets the money. The music industry would like to play itself as the only victim, and demands special treatment. However, every creator/rightsholder should be included in the disbursement formula.
There is an added assumption: if the disbursement formula cannot be made 'fair' without monitoring everyone's traffic to determine which rightsholders should receive disbursements, it is unacceptable.
eskwayrd = m^2c^4
Why the fuck should I have my internet bill go up $5 a month!? I'm not downloading that much, my parents aren't either. Very few people are, why should the rest of us pay? Anyway, 90% of the music I download is not covered by SOCAN in the first place, how do those artists get their money?
This is a stupid idea. Music is now, for all intents and purposes, free. I'm cool with that, and I've made a living of music for years. WHAT THE FUCK DID SOCAN EVER DO FOR ME BUT PAY FOR LOBBYISTS?
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Sure you can do filesharing on a dialup connection, or a 256kbit connection. The difference is getting a whole album worth of MP3s in an hour, or 2 hours, basically, compared to the megabit and higher guys who would be getting it in ~10 minutes. The people sharing files TO you need the high bandwidth connection, and let's be honest, most people don't care about their upload ratio on PirateBay..
However you're right, hiking a $2.95 connection by $5 is just fucking mean. Maybe those guys could pay an extra $1 a month, the 256kbitters $2 a month, and 1mbit and above, the full $5.. kind of a "you pay for what you can possibly grab" sliding scale.
Dear Mr. Troll
According to The bank of Canada today: http://www.bankofcanada.ca/en/rates/exchange.html
1 CAD (noon) = 0.9956 0.9956 USD
In short, virtually par. You may not be good at making paper airplanes with our money, but you should also brush up your skills at using Google to find bank rates. Maybe read a newspaper from time to time to keep up with current events, d00d.
- A guy from "Canadia"
Well, then we better have a referendum, so we can vote this down. And the song writers pay for the referendum btw. I find mp3s sound terrible in our good systems and dont use them, thank you very much.
That should be enough to buy some really good plane-making paper *and* you'll have enough left over to buy some aspirin. Which obviously you'll need to sooth the headache you get from repeatedly banging your head after you find out that the Canadian dollar has been hovering around parity with the US dollar for quite a while now
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
No problem, we'll just switch to gloating about how you pay a surcharge on books and stuff for no good reason now!
I don't really see how this tax is going to work when I can usually get someone else's internet connection for free and generally that's not a big deal however with this tax how will it work? Also, could this harm city-wide wifi? I'm all for this if it comes to the US (the price is a bit steep but if it keeps the RIAA from attacking citizens its a good thing) but how will it work when there are multiple connections per person and one person can use other people's connection.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
Probably the same way the blank media levy is collected/distributed: lump sums given out to the songwriters' and musicians' guilds, which is then distributed by the guild on basis of need. Quite a fair way to do things, really, and one that the majority of Canadian musicians support wholeheartedly.
It's not done on a basis of need. I thought it was based on radio airplay, but it's actually a mix of airplay and album sales. The assumption is that the mix of downloads matches the mix of purchases. See the CPCC website.
I'm not sure it'll continue to be fair: both radio listening and album purchases are on the decline. It's hard to measure downloads.
I assume they send you a check every three months. Can't remember exactly where I read that, but I think that's how it works.
I'll wait and see who reacts and how. Sometimes simple ideas are revolutionary ideas and that scares the establishment.
Quack, quack.
How do you determine who gets what amount of money?
I mean let's say we decided to do this with software. We get all the software makers to agree that you can freely distribute their software. They won't be paid in sales, rather they'll be paid by a fee that all users are charged. This would sound good to many OSS people since it would make OSS a real viable way of doing business.
Ok, but how do we determine who gets what amount? We can't base it off of # of copies distributed. For one we don't know what that is, since the whole point here is to allow private individuals and sites to freely swap data. For two that wouldn't be useful since if it was free people might often want to try something out, even if it sucked and they deleted it. Well we also can't base it off of how many people use it, again no way to tell.
I suppose we could just do it as an even division, as in each piece of software gets X amount, but then that's not very fair. Someone could put out lots of crapware and get money for things that aren't worthwhile. Likewise there's no reason that some little tool that takes me 10 hours to write should be compensated the same as an entire operating system that took a million man hours.
Ultimately it adds up to being non-workable. Even if you decide that it would be ok to have a tax for given sorts of media, rather than selling it, it just doesn't end up making for viable compensation. Any method I come up with is either unworkable or unfair (or both).
I don't download or share music (or movies) and my cellphone is so old it only makes phone calls -- no: ringtones, camera, mp3 player, texting, video, etc -- and I *like* it that way! So I'd be paying $120 a year for something I do not or cannot do. Just great, freaking socialists can kiss my ass.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
hey music industry: you're done, you're history, you're bankrupt. buh bye
hey artists: you'll get paid for concerts and advertising, nothing else. get used to it
that's the reality we are becoming
don't like it? who cares. that's what is happening anyway. go ahead and make a bunch of laws counteracting this trend. i hereby pass a law saying the sun will move in the opposite direction. same impact on reality
end of story
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
$5/month is a bargain for those who enjoy getting new music at the rate of a CD every 2 months. When I was in my 20's, I would have agreed. Today, that's a rate almost 10 times greater than what I've spent on music over the last two years.
$5/month is a great deal for music, and maybe $10/month is good for movies, $30/month should be good for TV on demand compared to cable, and then there's video games, software, radio, subscription news, audiobooks, etc.; all of which might be digitally copied.
You can make a good argument for socialism on necessities like health care, education, road maintenance, etc., etc., but it makes a lot less sense when applied to luxuries. To categorize and treat them in the same way is a mistake.
Isn't this more like communism than socialism? Socialism tends to be distributing the cost of essential or important services among the populace - things like health care and education. Music doesn't really fall into that category.
- Michael Geist
First off, how does this reward indy artists who aren't signed to a label or registered with a society? If they release a CD this sort of thing would make it legitimate to copy their work and they'll never see the work.
Second, even if it did include all canadian artists, how do we distribute this fairly? I mean there must be thousands of artists creating copyrighted works each year. They're not all being "copied" as much as others.
Third, what if you don't use your net connection for music (e.g. me). I pay $12/mo for XM radio so I DON'T HAVE TO pirate music. Well that and I can listen to it in my car on trips.
I heard about a similar fee for cell phones, e.g. download as many ringtones/mp3s as you want. Just add a non-optional $5 fee to the cell. Well I'm in the same boat. I don't listen to mp3s with my cell. Why would I pay $5 more?
This is just more BS from the old school businesses trying to cope with the "nowadays."
The only way I can even remotely see this as fair is if they wholesale make downloading music free, but then they would have to administer servers so they could compensate the authors correctly out of the pool. So basically we would have to shut down itunes, amazon, and the like, and go to mygovtinmypocket.gov.ca and get our tunes from there.
How about not? Seriously. Friggin sense of entitlement has got to stop.
I'm 56, and I average under 5 gigabytes a month on my ADSL account. I subscribe to a legal internet radio service, which compensates artists, and actually plays real music. I do not buy or listen to, let alone download/upload the latest potty-mouthed rapper or Britney-clone-bimbo recorded with today's dynamically-over-compressed crapppy studio effects. Unauthorized downloading of today's crap is a crime against musical taste, and should be outlawed for that reason alone.
Secondly, this sets a very ugly precedent, if allowed to pass. Musical rights are like construction unions, there's a gazillion of them. The Songwriters and Recording artists are only two of them. There are also performance rights and reproduction rights and who knows what else. By the time they all get their pound of flesh, my $29.95 ADSL account will have a $15/month tax on it.
But wait, it gets better, or should I say, worse. I'm sure the movie industry will want its $15/month, as will the TV industry. and e-book publishers, and software publishers. So now we're looking at a $75/month tax on my $29.95/month ADSL account.
This money-grab must be stopped now.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Alright, so who do you charge $5? Are you going to charge $5 on my cell phone because I can connect to the internet? What about businesses? Do you charge per employee or per connection? I could be downloading stuff from my business connection. How about college campuses? Do you charge for each connection or for each user? Do you make the college collect the money or does the government do it?. What about libraries? Do they pay? Or how about public wi-fi - the free and the paid variety? And how do you charge for prepaid cell phoness?
What if I have two internet connections for my house - one for business and one for work. And two cell phones. Oh, and a wifi connection for when I'm at the airport. That $25/month from what I can see.
This'll never happen just because of the rules involved.
I've got one better for you
As someone who has never downloaded a song off the internet, and who buys all of my CDs
The problem with these blanket levies is that it presumes I've done something wrong. Go on the assumption I'm guilty, and I'll take that as permission to trade your &*^&* files until the cows come home.
Ripping off all of us because some of us are doing something you don't agree with is just plain fscking annoying.
If you charge me on the assumption I'm doing it, fine, I'll take that as a legal license to download whatever I like. Too bad there's not a single Canadian artist who interests me.
I don't agree with the media levy, and I sure as hell don't agree with this. It's a cash grab, and it will be applied to lame-assed Can-Con artists.
Good, you pay $10, and I'll pay $0, because I refuse to pay a levy on behalf of a bunch of kids who think it's their right to download every song known to man.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If this was to pass and weird shit passes in Canada quite ofter I will cancel my internet connection and use someones wifi. I will not pay for some shit music when music downloading is .02% of my internet usage (I usually only download songs from cd's I already own - around 600) so why the FUCK will I have to pay %20 extra for that %.02 usage because someones business model is failing and the record companies refuse to move forward.
I will look forward to dark wifi's popping up every where.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Anyway, 90% of the music I download is not covered by SOCAN in the first place, how do those artists get their money?
This is quite possibly the most important question about the whole scheme, because the answer is that most of the artists won't, and that ruins the entire justification for it in the first place, before you even consider the other problems with the setup.
I've seen how this plays out with other collection rackets like ASCAP, and it's very clear that especially as you move down the long tail, artists don't get paid. I know artists who *know* for a fact, their songs are being played on the radio, or in a commercial concert setting, and they're not being paid for those performances because they're too small. I know for a fact that I have tried to *volunteer* royalties to an artist where I was using their work in a setting that wasn't already covered -- and I was turned away. They don't care unless the pickings are big enough, and they don't pay out unless you pass a prevailing statistical threshold. Even some reasonably successful artists don't.
In order to get this stuff right, you have to be tracking exactly what's going through the pipes. And that currently is only possible at a point of sale or broadcast (and I don't think the rentiers have even gotten as far as bringing precision into that realm).
So a tax like this would essentially create a signle online distribution pie, fixed in size by the number of internet users, divied up amongst basically whoever some appointed gatekeeper can justify.
Terrible idea. We have enough of this going on in the industry and I think it's probable most artists and the art would be better off entirely without the gatekeepers, even if it meant forgoing the entire revenue stream. Because for most artists, that's more or less what happens anyway.
Tweet, tweet.
Oh dear, don't let this happen in your country! Once they start receiving money, they'll ask for more. In the Czech Republic the music industry receives levy from blank CDs/DVDs, memory cards, hard drives and (heads up gentlemen!) from printers. And it all started with only blank media being "taxed", the others are new additions.
In this case, the essential service being provided is the money that's being distributed to the artists, not the right to download that's being given to the people. I'm not going to say that the right to download should be socialized, I am, however, going to say that as it's nearly impossible to get a definite answer on who is actually downloading, the fairest way to pay for that essential service is to distribute the cost among everybody.
I was arguing for an exemption on low-speed connections for two reasons: first, they're quite rare in this country. Internet penetration is at about 85-90% right now, and of that, broadband penetration is at 80%. Second, it's simply not fair to charge a $5/month levy on a service that costs less than $5.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Well I was put into a private school and have no kids and plan to have no kids, so therefore I shouldn't have to pay as much taxes as part of it goes to funding public schools.
This is a waste of money. The association responsible for redistributing the money will first take a big cut for itself and then proceed to distribute the money to exactly those kinds of artists that don't need Internet distribution to begin with.
Sixty bucks a month, and no more legal or ethical gray areas about p2p filesharing?
For sixty bucks a month, we could essentially 'decriminalize' private non-commercial copyright infringement?
How is that not an example of money well spent?
Download all I like for $5/month sounds like a kick-ass buy to me. OK, maybe I won't use it, but hey, I don't have kids, and I don't mind paying taxes for schools, because (and this is the important part) it's a good idea to educate kids, even if I don't want or have them myself.
Y'know, the idea that, there's sometimes more important things than just my own selfish interests? I know the rhetoric of our time says that we're not supposed to care about anything other than our own selfish interests, but didn't FDR say something about how "naked self-interest is not only bad morals, but bad economics, too?"
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
This is exactly what I thought. I'm on dialup, average connection is 26.4. That's an hour to DL a song with the wife complaining about the phone being tied up, my son complaining about his connection being dead etc.
And I'd sure love to find a decent plan for 2.95 a month. I pay 24.95 a month (plus GST) in a province where the radio is advertising lo-hi-speed (128 kb?) connections for $14.95.
Oh well they figure fiber should be here inside of 20 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Jefferson cribbed from http://righttocreate.blogspot.com/2005/10/intellectual-property-monopoly-regime.html If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. The natural order of things is no copyright system at all. Copyright is a social construct. Exclusivity is granted on the premise that copyright promotes creation, and that the exclusivity does not outlast its virtue.
In modern society, the impediments to creation are not terribly high. If the copyright system ended tomorrow, creativity would not cease. While certain distribution channels (big budget Hollywood movies) would cease to exist, other forms of creativity would soon spring up to fill the void.
The main function of our present copyright system is to manufacture celebrity. Instead one million people investing $300 each worth of their time and energy (the Wikipedia model), we have one person overproducing $300 million (the Peter Jackson model).
Celebrity culture is a useful political tool. Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes they both
Oh yes, they both
Oh yes, they both reached for
The gun, the gun, the gun, the gun,
Oh yes, they both reached for the gun
for the gun. While we're collectively obsessed with the spectacle of OJ escaping justice, our political elites rob church basements.
Personally, I've had enough of the glove and the gun already, and I'm not buying this old "moral compunction" canard.
Err, I'm on dialup, only choice here, and one song takes an hour at least if doing nothing else at the same time.
Crappy phone lines, lots of mountains stopping satellites...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Germans have for decades paid a fee (Gebuehr) for watching television. Yeah, broadcast television. If you have a television, you must pay a fee for watching broadcast TV. And everyone accepts it. It is not a tax, it's a fee. If you don't have a TV, you don't have to pay the fee. Everyone just accepts it as being the same thing as the cost for cable.
There is no reason that the same thing can't work for music. If you have a radio or a computer, you would pay a fee. The fee could be added to the initial sale or import of any computer or radio.
Actually quite a few stores advertise buy it at the American list price.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Honest question (I don't want to hash up capitalism vs socialism). How long did it take you to get scheduled for your surgery?
I tore my ACL for a third time (well, not my ACL, my replacement ACL from the previous surgery) on December 28th '07. I was in the orthopedic on the 8th of January.
Friday I had surgery (Jan 25th), less than one month from injury to surgery. Every time I bring up Sicko to be a devils advocate we hear the horrors of waiting years, blah, blah. And of course the internet horror stories only have hyperboles of both systems.
My parents 'paid' for both the first two, I'm not looking forward to this one. My toe dislocation (which wasn't too bad) cost almost $2500 after insurance.
I thought you Canadians already paid for casual copying with a surcharge on blank CDs? Sounds like double-billing to me.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
I have the right to do whatever I want with my copy of the music. But that right not protected by the government, which compromises to add privileges to the author of the music. But that compromise is not their right, it is an exception to my rights.
My rights still include lending a copy to a friend, or playing a copy for a friend, even at a party, even if I don't stay in the room. Because stopping that is too much a compromise of my rights to their privilege to make money by stopping me.
And that way of protecting their commerce has worked for centuries. Even when copying the music was even easier than it is now, just singing back a song someone had heard. Today, there are so many ways to make money off the free distribution of music by people with copies (like selling concert tickets, merchandise, and licensing for advertising jingles or sampling/soundtracks) that the compromise should serve the privilege even less, and revert to protecting our rights even more.
Their privilege to make money doesn't mean a right to make all of the money, especially when I'm doing more of the work for them.
--
make install -not war
Better yet, trade them in for american paper airplanes, and when the american economy/currency eventually rebounds, you make money. for more paper airplanes.
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
This is how radio royalties were (are?) done in the UK. What used to happen was that they'd sample a handful of mainstream stations to see what was played and divide the royalties accordingly. A band could be played constantly on local stations but unless the stations giving them airplay were in the monitoring pool; the royalties would go to mainstream artists.
It was unfair then and it'd be unfair now.
The big issue is who gets to distribute this bucket of money. If its the traditional powers, then none of it will get to fringe players - and creativity will be depressed. However perhaps this might be useful if the population could vote online on who their $5 gets paid to. The payment of $5 is per-IP-address, so one vote per ISP assigned IP.
I know exactly what you mean. I don't have (or ever plan to have) kids, so why the hell should I have to pay taxes to pay for schools?
You can make that argument for a variety of different issues. Doesn't make it valid, or even a good idea.
You're absolutely right. But I see this as a first step in that direction. By 'decriminalizing' private, non-commercial copying in exchange for $5/month, then we take the first step to breaking the Record labels' stranglehold on distribution.
If I offered you the choice of selling $100 worth of your product/month with mild/moderate piracy or selling $500/month with rampant piracy, you'd probably (quite sensibly) pick the latter. But ever notice how it seems like the record labels would rather take the former?
That doesn't make any sense, until you realize that the most important thing for the labels to maintain is control over distribution channels. So a critical first step in breaking up the RIAA cartel/monopoly is decriminalizing private, non-commercial copyright infringement.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
all you need is a laptop to make music nowadays. your average middle class high school teenager has all the tools within his financial and technical acumen to make a full-scale high quality album of songs
and you're forgetting that people make music because they like music, not because they like money. teenage boys pick up a guitar not so someday they will have the investment portfolio of jay z, but so that they will get in some teenage girl's pants
in other words, the motivation to make music will always be there, even if it costs $1 million to make a song and you have zero chance of ever recouping your investment. somebody will still spend that $1 million in that hypothetical environment
because the real return on that investment is love music
you don't understand the motivations here
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If I'm not doing anything illegal, why would I pay an extortion fee on my internet connection which presumes that I am?
How do I know that the artists I listen to get paid from this? They're not Canadian, and they're not mainstream. So, whatever statistic they come up with isn't going to pay the people whose music I listen to.
I buy CDs because I like music; I love music in fact. I like to have the physical CDs, both to be sure that the artist gets paid, so that I have the physical medium to play, or to rip to MP3, or to read the liner notes, or,just because it's something tangible and I'm a materialistic bastard and I like to see a full CD rack (or, several, in fact).
There are record labels who I will buy almost anything I see with their name on it, because they've helped me to find a whole bunch of music I really love. I want them to get paid too; because they make it their job to find music they think I'll like, and that carries value to me.
I fail to see why I should fork over $5/month to some comittee so they can decide that Avril-fucking-Lavigne needs a cut of my music money, or that Ann Murray must have lost some money because I have an internet connection.
It's a complete cash grab, it presumes that I'm doing something naughty, and it's completely arbitrary and unfounded. I spend $500-$700/year on CDs, don't think that you're entitled to another $5 just because someone else downloaded your music without paying. And, before you point out that's about 1% of my music budget, it is the principal of the thing. I'm not intending on subsidizing anyone else's music habit.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I strongly agree with what you're saying.
However, I would add a second caveat, which is that in order to qualify for the proceeds from the levy, music must be distributed in a fairer system. It shouldn't be like the blank media levy, which works something like this:
People are stealing are music
They are using blank CDs to do so
So let's charge everyone who wants a blank CD, because people are using them to get free music
But despite the fact that we acknowledge and accept this free music, it should still cost the same.
In other words, if I am buying a CD, I'm paying for the music. So shouldn't I get it free any ways? This should not be seen as a reactive measure - it needs to apply only to those willing to condone the free distribution of music.
If that happens, I'm all for it. But if the industry starts taxing everyone and telling us we're still wrong, that's just hypocritical.
I'm more worried about independent artists not getting their fair share than I am about uncompensated sharing offline. Not even Google can guard against advertising fraud, so even an honest count can be stuffed and the money directed to established publishers. That might be the purpose and this proposal has nothing to do with artists at all.
It's a nice example of what went wrong with AllOfMp3.com
They were legally paying their tax to the local Russian Organization for Multimedia Service (ROMS).
But the problem was that major labels weren't associated with ROMS and didn't get money of the deal. The rest is history and was thoroughly reported on
The rest of the World isn't the USA, and private for-profit organisation aren't the answer to everything.
As this will happen in Canada, there are high chance that a government body will handle the money.
Which means no for-profit obligation, nor shareholder or whatever is the average USA company's excuse to rip customer off.
Which also mean publicly declared finance and the slightest abuse won't probably go unseen.
I don't know well enough about Canada. But here around, in Europe, there's a lot of efforts by government media agency to support small local national efforts. Government are sponsoring lots of small scale projects.
(In fact, to go back to the Russian exemple, it has been reported in some of the article here on
I bet that, if such scheme are finally accepted and deployed in Europe (and maybe this future Canadian one), the small local artist will in fact get more easily state sponsored funds.
So in other words, RIAA maybe won't like it, but this kind of solution is probably what the internet has been needing for quite some time.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
In France about the same thing was supposed to pass with the local version of the DMCA (it was called "license globale").
In the end, it was shot down, by means of numerous violations of the way laws are voted (changing the text minutes before the vote, with a very large text). Of particuliar interest was how film industry lobbyist came inside the national assembly building (which is strictly forbiden); right after this, the law didn't include films anymore, only music.
As for the criticisms: how is this different from television?
The fact: the product is easy to distribute to everyone at the same time, with no additional cost;
The conclusion: everyone who is able to receive it pays for it.
Then you distribute the money based on a statistical evaluation of how much each artist is viewed, just as public TV does (for exemples, piratebay statistics or the like).
I really don't see how it is a problem or even a new idea.
Don't take my posts literally; it's just code to control my botnet.
Started as a partial tear. Low triage, because I could still walk, albeit not a lot. When it gave out at the doctor's office, becoming a full tear, it became high triage and I was in surgery a week later. Well... offered a spot a 5 calendar days later, but I had a vacation scheduled for that week and had to ask for a spot the following week.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Personally, I think something like this proposed "statutory license" is going to eventually be necessary. I don't see any way of stopping piracy, you certainly can't stop it by appealing to people on ethical/moral grounds, and stopping it by technical means (DRM etc) just seems like an eternal arms race that'll be a dead weight on the economy as a whole.
That said, you make an entirely valid point. Why music, and not movies? (although given there's no way to 'pirate' the 'going to a theater experience', one might argue that the MPAA doesn't really _have_ a piracy problem, at least not in the way that the RIAA does...)
Why movies, and not Windows and Photoshop?
However, I would suspect that the # of songs downloaded dwarfs the # of operating systems or movies being downloaded by an order of magnitude. So what would seem more reasonable is maybe $5/month for music, $1.50/month for movies, and $0.50/month for software.
What's wrong with that?
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
Although I think that this is a step in the right direction, there are a few parts that make me uneasy. Chief among these is the idea of "Virtually all sharing on the internet and wireless devices [being] tracked." I really can't think of any way that this is going to work without being a major privacy issue.
Personally, all my music is paid for - either on CD (which then has been ripped, 9/10 times) or from the Audible/iTMS facilities.
In the UK, we don't pay the blank media tax. In Finland, they do, in Canada, they do. If I was paying that tax, or even a tax on my internet connection, I'd feel ok about downloading as much music from the recipients of those funds as I liked - as I'm paying them for it already.
Look, crazy music peoples, if you're going to treat me like a criminal, I'm going to act like one. Don't give me shit about "it's illegal to copy this disk" on DVDs, CDs, cinemas, whatever - it's a smack in the face.
If it hits the UK, that's it - I ain't buying any more music. Period. (Well, full stop anyway)
I know exactly what you mean. I don't have kids, and I don't ever plan on having kids. So why the fuck should I have to pay for schools? We just had area rate get passed here, can you believe it, I'm gonna have to pay an extra 20 bucks a year just so a bunch of brats can have better computers and up-to-date textbooks and stuff?
Obviously this is a great injustice for me personally, right?
All facetious rhetoric aside, if you don't like SOCAN, um, are you required by law to join SOCAN? (I really have no idea about this...) The fact that SOCAN has it's flaws doesn't necessarily mean that this is a bad idea.
As far as I can see on this issue, we have a very stark choice. We can keep trying to put toothpaste back in the tube and try and stop piracy with DRM and trusted computing and RIAA lawsuits, or we can 'stop piracy' by "decriminalizing" private non-commercial copyright infringement.
It seems like a lot of the arguments against this idea boil down to "this idea isn't perfect so therefore we should stick with the status quo". Has anybody actually looked at how awful the status quo on IP law is right now?
For just one small example, what's the total cost to the American taxpayer of the RIAA lawsuits?
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
back when napster was good, and used by 60+ million people, the record industry should have just bought it and charged $15 a month for access, filesharing and mass copyright infringement would never have happened and the record industry would be on a record high, now artists, are proposing a broken version of the same system out of desparation due to the horrible way in which they have been screwed over.
Generally, any taxpayer gives the police money for "no reason". Clearly, if you paid the police by the crime, there would likely be a rise in crime, if you get my drift. And if there weren't such a rise in crime, then we'd have no police.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
That would increase the base cost of Internet access by 25-30%, if prices in Canada are in line with the USA. That seems out of line when compared with other compulsory licenses.
Use part of the taxes to provide a site where music, films etc. can be downloaded for free from within Canada and then distribute the taxes each month based on the number of times an item is downloaded to a unique IP address that month.
Since you're doing this for business, you should be paying for the business DSL package. The easiest solution is then to argue that this should not be applied to business packages since it is the home users that are the ones typically doing this.
:rolleyes: learn to read sarcasm.
- A guy with a "sense of humor"
I like basketball!!1!
He goes on with graphs that show the alleged correspondence. Link here
I don't believe you!1!!1onelouder!
Why would I have Canadian bills in the first place if I didn't, you know, get them in exchange for some other currency or actually live in Canada? Batman would have figured this out already!
I like basketball!!1!
Our health care system is a poor choice if you're looking for some socialist utopia. Canada's health care system consistently comes out as overly-expensive and under-performing in OECD studies.
For example, about $15K/year of my taxes go towards a health care system that I rarely need. And when I do need it for something big, it's not there. Either the procedure I need isn't covered, or the wait time is potentially fatal.
I've been on a 4-year waiting list to see a specialist for surgery, and there's no end in sight. Admittedly, I should have gone to the US long before this, and I would have if I thought it would be this long - the wait has cost me more in lost income than the surgery, even at US prices.
The only way out of the mess is to get private care elsewhere, or use contacts to jump the queue. What a sacred cow, indeed.
You might be on to something there. The paper airplane market isn't really discussed much among bigwigs on Wall Street but I think they're just unaware of the next big thing. And by big thing, I of course mean something inappropriate.
I like basketball!!1!
right, because nobody downloads music at work. :-)
Currently hooked on AMP
I may be misinterpreting things here, but wouldn't this effectively socialize the Canadian recording industry? If filesharing is legal and people pay a tax to support the recording companies / artists, then that's effectively socialized music.
Now it's not unheard of for Canada to socialize media -- see the National Film Board, for instance -- but this seems rather extreme.
Let's say you make $25,000 a year and would just like your kid to have internet access so he's on even footing with the other kids at school.
It shouldn't cost you an extra $600/year.
If songwriters want my money, they can write songs I'm willing to pay for and distribute them in a manner that makes the price attractive.
It is not my fault that the music industry fucked up their distribution model so bad that they need a government mandated tax to stay alive.
I have a better idea. Just let people copy songs for non-commercial purpose for free NO MATTER WHAT. Real artists can still sell tickets to concerts.
paintball
"...it shouldn't be applied to *all* internet connections..."
It should not be applied at all, it's similar to the CD and DVD levy that assumes everyone is a crook.
It's an interesting concept but it's not right to generalize that you know for sure that everyone (100%) of people are and always will download music off of the Internet. Having a high speed Internet connection doesn't make you a criminal.
I don't know of any other situation where all people using a service are accused of criminal activity. It would be like everyone with a telephone had to pay a fine because telephones are sometimes used for criminal purposes.
Any time an organization has the word "Collective" in its title, you know it's a bad idea. Basically, this is a bunch of lobbyists grabbing money from everyone and distributing it how they see fit. No thanks.
P.S. Before any Canadians get all upset because of the subject line... get over it. I'm Canadian too and live in Canada.
Actually a lot of stores are now charging the US list price on Books instead of the inflated "Canadian" prices.
Um, being canadian i've been called a pinko commie bastard by my yankee colleagues more times than i can count, mainly between 1989 and 2000. It seems to have been pretty much assumed that we're "zOMG EVIL SOCIALISTSASDASDHAGSDHASFDHGASFDHGASFD" for a while by the more ignorant of the american populace.
plus, we already "just have the government take everyone's money away and spread it around equally among everybody else." for many intents and purposes.
And we all know how evil we canadians are. McCarthy sure was on the ball eh?
because If I have to pay for this automatically you can bet I'll never pay more for a CD again.
I don't download music, and I do value a tangible CD's. I prefer to convert my own cd's to mp3's so they are done right instead of trying to download something of such poor quality that it sounds like it's got it's own extra rhythm of ticks and pops.
If I am forced to pay 5$ a month because I have internet, I will never pay the 15$-20$ per CD again, so I guess it would be they're loss.
It should not be applied at all, it's similar to the CD and DVD levy that assumes everyone is a crook.
The nice thing about the CD levy is that it does not assume that you are a crook because the same act that introduced that also made it legal to copy the music for your own private use. Hence it assumes that people buy blank CDs to copy music. I would argue that this is most definitely true since for computer data you would buy DVDs and these do not (yet) have a levy.
One one hand - why should I pay for something I won't do? Why should the privilege of using an internet connection automatically put money in the pockets of one specific business group who has *nothing* do to with providing me my internet services? Also.. this is Canada... non-commercial copying for personal use is already expressly legal as far as I recall.
On the other hand.. it's a compromise. They should go further - and allow commercial services to use their material as well, under some other similarly broad license. It could open things up to some innovative new services.
Oho. Sounds like the principle behind another well-known economic system: "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
Why do you assume such a guild would distribute the income fairly? Isn't it more likely that they would abuse their power over artists if we allowed them to determine where all the money goes?
Being a Canadian, this probably affects me more than the majority of readers here.
I might go for this, but the implementation would be tricky. What I have in mind is the following.
1) Do not tack this directly onto the internet bill without consent of the user.
2) Should be $3.00 or lower, scaled to the quantity of songs downloaded
3) Should take the form of a hook (like an encryption key) that identifies the user of a file sharing app has having a legitimate license.
4) The key should be able to confirm that the license is legit and up to date, and nothing else (no way to trace a key to a particular user).
END COMMUNICATION
I'm 26 years old, and I had knee surgery in November of 2007.
When you get older and need serious treatments for cancer or heart disease you'll be happy.
Quite a fair way to do things
No, it's not. It presumes guilt instead of innocence, which is contrary to Western Society.
I'd happily pay an extra $5/month on my 7mbit cable connection, however, if it got rid of the legal grey areas surroudning file sharing.
In Canada, there are no grey areas. File-sharing is legal, period.
...Stu
Pathetic scum sucking filth.
net surcharge !solution
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
whatever entity ends up collecting those fees will have no incentive to actually distribute them, and will probably do its level best to hang on to them. That's the problem with all such schemes. Furthermore, how do you determine who is a artist deserving of compensation? Hell, for that matter how do you determine who is an artist in the first place? If it's just a simple matter of registering oneself with the government as a musician, hell, sign me up right now. I wouldn't mind some free money.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
How do you arrive at 60 dollars? You failed math or something? 5 dollars per month for music does NOT mean 60 dollars in extra taxes my friend unless you are very naive.
Because the movie industry will want the same deal, and the TV industry, and the software industry and the games industry and the news agencies and anyone else who has ever claimed that their content is being shared against their will via the internet.
This tax would open the flood gates.
I don't know what a base internet connection cost in canada but 5 dollar would seem like a massive increase for basic connections. Not everyone has 60 dollars to spend.
Would this 60 dollars also "buy" you all the music in the world or just canadian music?
What if I don't listen to music because I am deaf? Do I still need to pay this tax?
No my friend, this is a bad idea.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The big problem with this levy is that I don't give a crap about Canadian songwriters.
Yeah, I'm Canadian; that's no secret. I just don't like many local artists, because this lame folky pop-rock alternative MTV-lite snore just isn't my cup of tea. In fact much of the music I like comes from the dirtiest clubs in Detroit, New York and Britain. House baybee! And guess what: those folks aren't signed to any big labels, so they wouldn't be seeing a penny of this tax.
The artists have the solution available to them: cut out the middleman! I haven't bought a music CD in ages, it's redundant! The first thing I do is rip it to my computer, then fling the MP3 over to my car deck, or stream it over the net to wherever I am at that moment, be it the office or a friend's house. The physical disc is dead to me, I buy tracks off of Beatport.com, largely because they have a pretty nice selection of house/trance/techno. I pay between 1.49 and 2.49 per track, which may appear steep compared to 99c elsewhere, but tracks purchased from Beatport come with DJ playback rights, the same as buying a vinyl record. Of course they contain no DRM whatsoever, and are all encoded in 320kbps MP3, ~190kbps MP4, or uncompressed wave for a slight surcharge. Most of their stuff is also hard to find elsewhere, except in other online DJ stores. Considering the niche, I think their model is excellent and there's not much I'd want to change about it.
If Canadian artists want to make money off the internet, they should sell their music on the internet! DUH! The biggest thing they're ignoring is that music downloaders, while plentiful, still make up a small portion of total internet users. There are a LOT of people out there in the later stages of life who couldn't care less about Britney Spears or even Radiohead. They use the internet for email, eBay, casual blogging and Skype, with a few social games on Pogo. The music industry has no business charging these already cash-strapped people $60/year for something they don't use. Heck, they have no business charging ME $60/year because I don't even spend that much on their overplayed undertalented releases in the first place!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
My wife was diagnosed with uterine cancer. 3 days after the diagnosis, she was in the operating room. Don't believe all the crap you see on the news.
Karma: Neutered
No, because you may make more use of the road systems than people who do have kids. Why should they be paying for your roads? It's much easier if everybody just pays a tax based on their total income on the "it'll all come out in the wash" basis. Plus your tax is contributing to the overall good of the country through improved public education, so it's good for you in the long run anyway.
We actually tried this during PSHCE classes (Sorry, no sources to cite here!) and gave people realistic incomes and tax rates, then asked them to work out how much tax they honestly thought they should pay. Some people reduced the amount they pay on health but increased police spending, some didn't pay as much on education but wanted better maintenance of the water infrastructure. It's a surprisingly small difference which makes it just not worth the extra overhead of you saying what you want to spend your money on and the subsequent calculations of who owes what, and how to make the budgets actually balance against what is in effect a varying tax rate for each civil service.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
While Canadian Copyright law is neither based on tort law or property law, and is based on statute rather than common law, Canadian courts have generally held that it must be read consistently with common law or the Code civil du Quebec, and must not be so unfair as to bring the system of justice into disrepute.
Most provincial courts will look to injunctive relief first and foremost, and will generally only consider liquidated or ascertained damages.
In Quebec, 1457 & 1458 CcQ are the tools for assessing damages, and are generally in line with the common law practice of strictly limiting damages to real losses incurred.
The (federal) Copyright Act is consistent in this too, favouring the wording: "injunction, damages, accounts, delivery up and otherwise", in that order. The key point with respect to civil actions:
Statutory damages are available in Canada, but they are dramatically different from statutory damages under U.S. statute.
In particular, the trend has been to read this very broadly: "38. (1)(3)(b) the awarding of even the minimum amount referred to in subsection (1) or (2) would result in a total award that, in the court's opinion, is grossly out of proportion to the infringement, the court may award, with respect to each work or other subject-matter, such lower amount than $500 or $200, as the case may be, as the court considers just."
Plaintiffs pursuing civil actions against large-scale commercial infringers almost invariably avoid opting for statutory damages (a noteworthy exception being Microsoft Corporation v. 9038-3746 Quebec Inc., et al., which was concerned with large-scale counterfeiting by corporations whose behaviour before and during the trial, and whose obvious bad faith, made opting for statutory damages less risky than usual. Several other cases have seen statutory damages reduced to pennies per infringement, on the grounds that statutory damages are not designed to unjustly enrich plaintiffs, but to facilitate the court's determination of equity.
Pursuing not-for-profit music and video sharing by private persons is probably pointless under the Copyright Act as it stands, unless the plaintiff can use a small claims system to reduce his or her or its costs.
You mean the same Ron Paul who claims that international intervention is evil?
Clearly everyone in Canada only has an internet connection so they can read my posts on Slashdot so I think they should all pay me $5 as well. What a crock - let's assume every subscriber is a criminal and make them all pay. I think I've downloaded 5 iTunes songs in my life and I don't pirate, I like buying my music and having the media, etc. And what about video (TV/movies)? And software? Aren't they all entitled to their own tax, too? How about instead of perpetuating the music industry's inability to adapt to changes in the world AND continuing to support their ability to OWN artists we allow the artists to become free from these assholes and market themselves directly to their potential audiences? The tool that destroys their masters could become the tool of their salvation.
"The bigger the lie, the more they believe." - Det. Bunk
The day that someone will collectively pay for my time I am willing to collectively pay for theirs. Since I have no use for the downloading of music I would expect that I would be exempt.
There is so much more to life than music and I just can't comprehend how this has gotten so far out of hand that we must sell our souls to meet this greed.
There is so much wrong with this that I can't even see how it can be considered. Before we pay for music IP maybe we should start collecting and paying teachers for their IP efforts to teach us how to read. I would rather pay the teachers the $5 than any musician.
I sir would like you to point out how this levy has been distributed and how you consider this fair? All I know is I paid through the @#@$$@% just to store my pictures. Now I moved on to DVDs.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
Ok, I start a band. Some label picks me up. They take care of the legal stuff, the government doses out a fair share to them, part of which they then give to me? Maybe proportional to the actual contents I have produced. Do I have to prove that people actually listen to it?
It seams that we need communism to solve this problem. If musicians are entitled why not everyone else.
If you can't make a living maybe it's time you find a new vocation. Just don't ask me to support you.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
The nice thing about the CD levy is that it does not assume that you are a crook because the same act that introduced that also made it legal to copy the music for your own private use. Hence it assumes that people buy blank CDs to copy music. I would argue that this is most definitely true since for computer data you would buy DVDs and these do not (yet) have a levy.
OK, so when I use my CD-Rs to back up my data, which artist get paid?
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
To ensure you have access to decent health care... good
To ensure your education is the best in the world.. excellent
To give people access to cheap transport... great
but to ensure some little brat can download the latest from Britney Spears without mommy paying for it? I'll keep my $5 per month thank you.
This person is lying.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Thank you for clarifying. That it is essential that songwriters be compensated by society for an illegal activity is an argument that I'll have to think more about. It's compelling, but I'm on the fence about it.
However, in addition to my argument about the cascade of other levies that this would likely precede (I know, I dislike slippery slope arguments too, but I can't imagine the motion picture & television industries not wanting an equivalent), I'll throw another argument against this:
By fixing the levy at $5/month, if this proposal became law, then the SAC would be defining the value that society places on music, rather than the marketplace. I believe that socialism has its place, but I don't think it's here.
...they are so smart concern to these United States. It must reek to live next door to a huge retarded dragon with 10,000 nuclear weapons.
Let me first say that this suggestion is much better than monitoring all our Internet activities so that we can't share with each other.
But I also have to point out that this means that normal people have to pay a tax that will mostly end up in the pockets of rich people who wrote or performed music some 10 years ago. Exactly how does that benefit society? If taxes are collected, it is much better spent on development and research.
As already written by professional musicians here in the previous comments, music will still be produced. Maybe even former rock stars will keep on recording music when they don't receive $4711 a minute for doing nothing.
I've noticed a lot of stores with signs saying they'll charge the Yankee price on books and magazines. At least in BC.
Like anywhere, certain things are cheaper depending on the country you live in. For example, in Canada, health insurance and pot are pretty inexpensive so if I have to pay a bit more on a book printed in the US, then, you know, whatever.
one wonders what can motivate you to even comment
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There is no such DVD levy. Check it out for yourself or ask at the store.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
Should the draft be required to pay this tax? What about the blind that cannot see movies? Should they pay as much
I would not accept a $5 month - I am not deft nor blind, but I would still never use that much money on music.
I do support using taxes to pay for music, but not this way. It is unfair to claim internet users must pay this tax - non-internet users would still be able to benefit - all internet users such as the deft and people like me who don't listen to new music would pay for something we don't use. People living single pay more than families. The list goes on.
A tax on the other hand that is evenly distributed would be more fair, then families with children at school age - the group most likely to download much music would pay their share, deft could reclaim their tax.
It shouldn't be applied to any internet connections, high speed or elsewise, except on a strictly opt-in basis. Those that are worried about lawsuits or want to "support the artists" are free to do so. Those who want to use the internet without greedy music industry bastards dipping their hands into our wallets (and by the way, happen to not bother pirating the shit music that's out there anyhow), can continue as we were.
Sorry, but anything that requires the user to pay for a service that benefits a special interest group but not the user himself/herself, is not in any way fair.
Whatever.
Seriously, what. ev. er.
Keep your internet. Tax the living shit out of it. Monitor it all you like.
I'll just go back to borrowing CD's off of my friends or getting them at the library and make as many copies as I feel like. Track THAT, fuckers.
I don't share or use shared music. I listen to my CD's only. So why should I pay $120/year so that "right's holders" earn their money for free.
First of all, it's just plane theft.
Secondly, what incentive would musicians have to create better or more music? Just collect from anyone who uses the internet (which is pretty much everyone). What a deal. Get me in on that one. I write software and people using the internet could be illegally using it. I want my $120/year.
Finally, where does it stop? In Germany, the GEMA gets money for copiers, media (CD and DVD, casettes, etc). But that wasn't enough. They wanted money for modems, harddisks, and processors because all those things could be used to copy music.
I'm sure paper is next.
What if by default, internet plans were shaped for P2P traffic and we could choose to pay a premium surcharge to remove the shaping.
The premium to be split up as follows:
1) A percentage of the surcharge goes to the ISP - if you're a P2P/BT user, then you most likely have a higher D/L than your average non p2p user, even if it's all legitimate stuff you're downloading.
2) A percentage goes to various bodies representing affected copyright holders.
Percentage 2) to be split relative to type (music/movie/etc) and split further by each industry's governing body, relative to market share. That way even the small independents who meet certain criteria are entitled to their share of the pie too.
If BT/P2P was made legitimate, it should beceome well filed/tagged to the extent that it ends up being simple maths to divide up the fund between which artists, in pretty much the same way that iTunes probably works right now.
Instead of passing on a fixed amount per sale though, they get a relative percentage of the monthly funds raised.
Yep...the RIAA's method is way better.
Downloading gobs of music only appeals to a certain demographic. I bought over 1,000 CD's in my youth, but now 2 or 3 a year at the most. I don't feel like paying $5/month for something I won't use. I'll need an Internet connection for the next 50 years (hopefully). Without inflation, that's $3,000. Probably more like $10,000 with inflation (a guess). That's quite a tax.
I never download or burn music using my internet connection or my computer. I honestly almost never listen to music at all. I am sick and tired of this stupid industry monopoly forcing people to pay some bogus fee for something we're not even getting.
It's one thing to offer a service of unlimited music downloads for $5 a month (I'm sure many people would subscribe!). It's a different matter altogether to charge people that "fee" out of the blue.
Probably the same way the blank media levy is collected/distributed: lump sums given out to the songwriters' and musicians' guilds, which is then distributed by the guild on basis of need. Quite a fair way to do things, really, and one that the majority of Canadian musicians support wholeheartedly.
Distributing on the basis of "need" is a poor way to do it from the standpoint of incentives. Why would an artist bother to create good music when they could just sit around being "needy"?
A much better approach would be to emulate the relationships performance rights organizations (ASCAP and BMI) have with radio stations. The money that is collected from their blanket licenses (http://www.ascap.com/licensing/radio/radiofaq.html) is distributed to artists based on how many times their songs are played. In other words, you should monitor the pattern of downloading activity and distribute the income on that basis.
Besides, the 'according to need' has the nice effect of not forcing people to pay taxes to Celine Dion.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
I am always impressed by what new and, frankly disturbing, trends towards making the telecommunications business in this country nothing more than a pseudo-fascist-government tax grab. The other day I caught a proposal about how the Canadian Amateur Sports association wants everyone in Canada who subscribes do some sort of television service to pay sixty-cents a month for the pleasure of being obligated by federal law to have them. They claim that they will use the money to fund Canadian amateur sports, but when you run the numbers, they stand to make over 160,000,000 in profit per year from this scam. Then I look at this, five dollars a month to go to SOCAN- for what? To give money to Nickelback, more or less. SOCAN only represents Canadian artists. Because of the CRTC's policies I boycott Canadian music (besides, have you ever heard Nickelback?). The problem with this "levy" isn't that it is just about the internet. It is about the Canadian media's sense of entitlement. Rather than compete on reasonable grounds they have adopted, and logically so(thanks to insane policies like this), a policy of "Our content is so bad you have to pay us not to deal with it" They get their money regardless of quality.
Then why do I have to pay for my dentist? My optometrist? Ambulance ride? Social medical care doesn't include ALL medical care, just the core.
Also medical care, roads, police and other *necessities* for functional society are social services because *everyone* needs them sooner or later.
Music is a *luxury*. We are already paying for CBC from our taxes, so the cost is hidden. But maybe we should be paying for it by number of televisions in the house?? Yeah, that will be a huge success, not to mention privacy issues.
Everyone just wants money. Frankly, they can frig off. If they want to support artists, then maybe they should lobby for government for funds NOT blame internet connections for it (and gov't can tell them to frig off). We are already paying A LOT more for internet services here than in the US. Now they'll just add $5 at a time until it tops $100/month.
Finally, you keep typing *cost*. It is not *cost*, it is a money grab, nothing more.
PS. This proposal makes as much sense as if someone wanted $10/month from every subscriber for all the pirated software people download. What about GPL and BSD and other free software? Sorry, the central organization needs to make money off of these authors too I guess.
Is it safe to assume that a million people will cancel their internet connections on the day this scheme is implemented? Probably. Is it safe to assume that Telus, Bell, Shaw and other Canadian ISPs know this and will want to keep that $40million+ per month revenue stream alive and well? Probably. Is it safe to assume that these ISPs will kick this proposal in the SAC? Yes, SAC pun (Song Association of Canada) intended.
So just because they are angry with some persons who share music and they can't find exactly who they are, they want to make the whole society pay for them. This is a form of evil communism, which denies the right of every person to be an individual and considers everyone to be the property of the state or society. The idea is: You, although you have not done anything wrong, belong to the society, and some other members of the society have done something we don't like, therefore since you are also a member of the society and we cannot catch the person who did what we don't like, you will also have to pay a portion of the price. In a free society, individuals have their own rights and responsibilities as individuals, and people should not be held responsible for what their neighbour does. A society adopts a communist mindset the moment it starts holding you responsible because your neighbour did something illegal. It is the most extreme offence against individualism and the greatest minority: the individual.
Why is it that some folks have a mental block regarding what capitalism is and what socialized endeavors are?
If your country has relatively free markets, recognition of private property and a state that mostly stays out of public ownership of enterprises then, in broad terms, it is a capitalistic one (spare me any detail about what I may have missed, I may not know exactly what a capitalist country is but I sure as hell can recognize one when I see it).
A country spousing the principles of capitalism can and often do socialize some services (because as the above post pointed out is the right thing to do from the moral and economical sense).
There are few non capitalistic countries in the world: North Korea, Cuba and in their way into capitalism Vietnam, China and sundry former Soviet republics. On the way out of Capitalism is Venezuela, only time will tell if this is a successful move or not.
To claim that Canada does not follow capitalism is inane in extreme.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
When I visited Canada this autumn I found out that CDs are very expensive. I needed to buy CDs to backup my photos (to male room for more photos on the camera). Next time I know I need to bring my empty CDs from home.
I think I Canada wants to pay the music distribution industry with tax money it should raise income tax, not introduce costs into other specific activities.
The indirect result of introducing irrelevant costs into computer storage mean that some data that would otherwise be backuped would not be (because of raised costs) and eventually some of it would be lost, some of it resulting in loss of money. So what happens here seems to be just shifting of costs. The same goes for taxing internet connections at a flat rate. It would would result in some of the less fortunate members of Canadian society being cut off the main source of information and education because of a higher entry threshold. Shifting the costs to income tax would be distribute it in a much more socially responsible way, and since the aim of all of this is to make musicians into government employees (and later probably creators of all other forms of arts as their works become distributable on the internet) it is better to do it the same way all other civil servants are being paid.
Canadians wholeheartedly supporting this nonsense should look at their NAFTA partners in Mexico.
The Mexican equivalent organization also collects copyrights for all composers (not yet in the way proposed in the article, but for several other legislated privileges) but guess what, the composers that make the most out of these arrangements are the president of the organization and his close friends.
They are so cosy and comfy milking the taxpayers money that they have asked for compensation when a Public Domain work is commercialized because the poor lambs lose income. Bunch of vultures.
When an organization receives public money they should be accountable to the electorate, so will they? If similar experiences in other places are an indicator they will not, and will only forced to publish what they are doing under duress.
What about the novel concept of paying the person that provides a service for me? What about the novel concept of the government getting out or private matters?
Proposals like this by special interest groups is only one more attempt to milk the state machine for their very particular and private benefit. People hailing this as a great idea are completely deluded.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
indeed. what is being proposed is communism, but people on slashdot do tend to wail and moan if you point out that their proposed replacement for the copyright system they suddenly started hating the day they discovered bit-torrent is called communism.
It's ironic, either you believe in a principle and will defend it, or you don't . The anti-copyright lobby want to hate capitalism and moan and whine about it, yet still enjoy the content it produces, but not partake in anything that amounts to actual effort towards paying for it.
I have respect for communists who will argue their stance, its an entirely valid POV with many good points. What I hate is hypocrites who would like communism applied to people who make the music and movies they like, but not applied to their own career or income.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
fair way ? i guess people who would more likely throw old eggs and tomatoes at britney and backstreet boys (or whatever is the new thing) would disagree with them or similar crap artists ;) getting the money.
Rich
You can make a good argument for socialism on necessities like health care, education, road maintenance, etc., etc., but it makes a lot less sense when applied to luxuries. To categorize and treat them in the same way is a mistake.
I don't know where you come from, but in this part of the Unites States, regular office visits and knee surgery are luxuries.
I just thought I'd point that out. I'll let you decide what it means to the rest of your argument.
Kid-proof tablet..
And we all know how evil we canadians are.
You ARE evil, because you are collectivist. Humans are essentially individual, not collective (so called "eusocial") animals. Your culture runs contrary to that principle. That makes you no-funny-face evil.
Python is nice quick and flexible... but it provides so much rope a monkey would hang the whole ecosystem with it. -- in
Ahh. You begin to understand the meaning of "socialism".
Really? It's about sharing money/costs? And I thought socialism was about "collective ownership of means of production". Do smth to do away with fuzzy thinking.
By spreading the cost out among everybody, rather than just the people who use the service, you can reduce the overall cost for everybody.
Only if you keep quality, worker and company motivation and costs equal between those two systems more or less the same. You implicitly apply a principle called ceteris paribus (given all other things equal...). The problem is it doesn't apply: in political system such as this, ultimately costs are sure to rise, quality and quantity are sure to plummet.
Python is nice quick and flexible... but it provides so much rope a monkey would hang the whole ecosystem with it. -- in
Canada's main exports are raw materials (oil and lumber) and its main imports are knowledge and people (immigrants). It's a mix of Third World economy, state simulation of socialist delusion, progressive naiviety and increasing practical problems.
See nice comment here:
"In conclusion, I'm not optimistic about Canada for various reasons--from the recent Chinese enthusiasm for buying up the country's resources to the ongoing brain drain--but also for a reason more profound. The biggest difference between Canada and the U.S. is not that you crazy, violent, psycho Yanks have guns and we caring, progressive Canucks have socialized health care, but that America has a healthy fertility rate and we don't. Americans have 2.1 children per couple, which is enough to maintain a stable population, whereas according to the latest official figures, Canadian couples have only 1.5. This puts us on the brink of steep demographic decline. Consider the math: 10 million parents have 7.5 million children, 5.6 million grandchildren, and 4.2 million great-grandchildren. You can imagine what shape those lavish Canadian social programs will be in under that scenario, and that's before your average teenage burger-flipper gets tired of supporting entire gated communities and decides he'd rather head south than pay 70 percent tax rates.
So, to produce the children we couldn't be bothered having ourselves, we use the developing world as our maternity ward. Between 2001 and 2006, Canada's population increased by 1.6 million. 400,000 came from natural population growth kids, while 1.2 million came from immigration. Thus native Canadians--already only amounting to 25 percent of the country's population growth--will become an ever smaller minority in the Canada of the future. It's like a company in which you hold an ever diminishing percentage of the stock. It might still be a great, successful company in the years ahead, but if it is, it won't have much--if anything--to do with you.
In that most basic sense, American progressives who look to Canada are wrong. Not only is Canada's path not a model for America, it's not a viable model for Canada. As Canadians are about to discover, the future belongs to those who show up for it."
http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis.asp
Python is nice quick and flexible... but it provides so much rope a monkey would hang the whole ecosystem with it. -- in
No problem, we just laugh at how only the rich get health care in your country. For no good reason.
And how China owns your asses.
In a complicated world where its not really possible to craft an ideal solution this is the way things should work.
Politicians, and especially environmentalists, in the US don't seem to understand this.
If you have, for example, a huge pollution problem, and the solution involves a different but lesser or more controllable form of pollution, you should migrate to that rather than rail against it as failing to be pollution free.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Off-topic: paragraphs are indented in books instead of having a blank line between them, to save paper. On the web, you can put a blank line between paragraphs, making indention unnecessary. For whatever reason, when I see indented paragraphs online, I can't help but see it as pretentious.
If I'm not doing anything illegal, why would I pay an extortion fee on my internet connection which presumes that I am?
You're making the false assumption that downloading music is illegal. It isn't. Take a look at Canadian Copyright law someday.
I wrote a longer article for IT World Canada that explained the background of these levy systems, as well as suggested a way to analyze when they are a good idea and when they are a bad idea.
Digital Copyright Canada forum
I do believe them to support that wholeheartedly, if in Canada being a "musician" means the same as in the rest of the world: 90% of the time "musician" (or "writer", or "artist") means "unemployed" or "minimum wage menial job during the day/night, and infrequent gigs in the spare time".
Unfortunately for them, in a very short time it will happen what happened mostly everywhere these schemes are in place: the administration of the Songwrites Guild will take most of the money, there will be strict exams and large taxes in place for entrance, songwriters and musicians will need heavy certification to get into the Guild etc.... for a funny version of what is not funny at all in reality check "Soul Music" by T. Pratchett ... you might say that's fiction and even "fantasy" kind of fiction, but it really does work that way, except there are humans instead of trolls enforcing the Guild rules.
It is ridiculous to compare a essential service like health care to an entertainment business. Why should we support this particular _business_ with what amounts to a tax? Why not support all failing businesses with some surcharge on something? No; this scheme inappropriately takes money from certain people to support another persons business model. It is wrong.
I am a Canadian, and I say my ISP will NOT be receiving another $5/mo so Little Johnny Pirate Pants can keep doing what he does. I don't share music files, so stay the FUCK out of MY WALLET. I can't believe these fucking asshole morons that are proposing this law - "HEY, let's penalize EVERYONE for the actions of a few! That'll solve our problems!" - are they trying to create more piracy?
Fuck Alanis! Fuck Avril! Fuck Barenaked Ladies! Fuck-damn, I am pissed and I WILL NOT PAY!
Wouldn't be simpler to start a 5$ unlimited music download service that would not be clothered with DRM ?
I personnally would go for that. But I don't think businesses would for some pretty obvious reasons...
Why put the charge for everyone ?
Yeah but the problem is with the P2P stuff like bittorrent, you upload music while you are downloading.
I don't see this proposal making uploading legal.
So users end up paying $5 more for internet, and they still get sued.
I'm not sure if this is the intention of the proposal...
I'm Canadian. So my argument stands.
And yet, someone will is still making the argument that they're losing revenue to something which I'm not doing, and therefore I should be taxed so they can get paid.
So, it's legal (well, technically not illegal, it's not a positive right yet) but I'm depriving them of revenue. Implicit in any newfound freedom I get from the indemnity of paying this levy is that I must have been doing something wrong before to be indemnified from. As interpreted, fair use in Canada mostly says that copying in limited extent is legal, there aren't explicit positive rights to file share. The government could be lobbied to change that if they wanted if we're not careful.
Hell, TFA even says
so, it's not like they're not making the argument that I'm breaking the law.
This levy cannot be put forth without the presumption (true or false) that I am, in fact, currently in violation of the law along with everyone else who has an internet connection.
File sharing is (mostly, kinda sorta) legal at the moment, but there is no guarantee that will remain true. The songwriters are either claiming (or trying to make it seem) that file sharing currently is illegal. Who needs facts when you can infer and muddy the waters?
But, again, I stand by my original point -- I fail to see why everyone with an internet connection should pay $5/month extortion money on the presumption that we must all be stealing their music.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
+5 Correct
try { Signature mysig = new CleverAttempt(); } catch(NonCleverSignatureException e) { postanyway(); }
Well I cycle nine months out of the year, and use public transit the rest of the time. The activities I use roads for do a lot less damage to the infrastructure then driving a motor vehicle, and yet I'm paying as much as a driver of an SUV or a truck. Shouldn't I pay less taxes for roads?
(Haven't decided whether I'm being sarcastic or not.)
When you have a proven statistic , that shows the following sept 2005 5.4 million canucks in p2p networks at same time and 4 months later in march, over 9.8 million , you see EVERYONE IS DOING IT EVERYONE, A) those that dont want to pay a levy/liscense on net accounts WTF do you need 7 megabit internet for? email, chat, surfing webpages, so the creation of a non levied/liscense account of less then 512Kbit with even less upload need. B) this proposed fee woudl net the songwriters/music creators ( 189 artists that endorse this ) 25 more times the revenue they get now so i believe it can be done for movies and tv and games as well. C) Bit torrent trackers are very able to give stats, mandate a law to include the turning over of downlaod stats ( not users the stats ) so the percentage can be handed out right. D) Only the CRIA opposes this all real people in canada love this, its affordable for me and you what noob would pay 10$ for one music album , versus 5$ a month and get all you can eat. E) it stops lawsuits dead, and allows legal system and cops to go after crime that hurts real people. F) this also allows ISPS to stop the filtering and start providing accoutns that workl for what the consumer really wants ( YEA ROGERS YOU SUCK THE WORST, BELL = MOST IMPROVED ) So in summary this would give a place like the USA over 7-8 billion per year, i saw a quote from the mpaa that they lose 6 billion world wide. IF thats even part true WHY do they not do this? is it really about money? 2 countries alone net them a profit of 3 billion per year, let alone the rest of the damn world. DONT KID YORU SELF ITS ABOUT CONTROL TPM = NEW DRM DRM = CONTROL say no to control
OK someone needs to do some checking on this before its blindly reported. 1/ The Songwriters association of Canada, is another collective front for the CRIA, the Canadian RIAA. They are a wing of the RIAA so they are just the record companies constant whine about losing money to thieves. A lot of actual recording artists in Canada have left the CRIA becuase they concider them to be greedy corporate trolls, and not helpful to their careers. 2/ Music downloading in Canada is already legal. A leavy is paid on all blank DVDs, CDs, and cassettes, that goes back to the music artists already. except that money is diverted to another group run by the CRIA, and artists see very little of it. The courts have ruled that file downloading of music is already legal, so this arguement is already over. So once again, the recording executives are trying to save their dying industry without actually doing anything for the consumer or the real artist. Trust me, this idea is bullshit, and the folks in the know wont let this turkey go anywhere.
THATS ENOUGH FOR THEM ALL
with estimated 10-11 million canucks doing p2p why i think this is great, 5$ a month to get all i want versus...10-15$ per cdr , 20+ $ for each store dvd etc. SCREW the rest sign me up
You do realise that Canada isn't a capitalist state, right?
You do realise that "not unabashedly capitalist" is not the same as "socialist", right? just like not being a teetotaler is not the same as being an alcoholic.
I mention this because many people in America (and particularly in Fox News) seem to have trouble grasping the distinction.
I buy a lot of comics books, and the last few months the surcharge has only been about 6 cents. I'm still a little annoyed that it's there, and it took DC longer to catch up then Marvel, but it's tolerable. I've noticed that some smaller comics companies don't list a separate Canadian price on the cover at all anymore.
Meanwhile there are still books in stores that are up to 25% more in Canadian dollars, because the labels are out of date (or the distributor hopes we won't notice). I just don't buy those ones, and I won't until they stop insulting me.
You don't even know what services your taxes are buying. They aren't user fees. You aren't paying for YOUR use of the system, you're paying for a better educated and healthier populace. It means your fellow citizens are less likely to be desperate and rip you off. It means they'll be more productive, less of an overall drag on the economy, less likely to erupt into class war. It means non-obvious things like your streets are cleaner and foreclosures are fewer. Since disparity is a determinate factor in one's health, as well as the health of society overall, it means you get secondary health effects yourself.
Not that the canadian system is fully effective or efficient or even completely genuine, but it is a better deal than most alternatives. If you don't value those things, perhaps you should consider emigrating to a place where despair is better tolerated... there are many to choose from.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Funny... we don't. At least you aren't ignorant eh jackass?
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One could argue that exposure to art can help a person in many ways (mental health => physical health, expanding the mind, inspiration, ...). Music is a great example of this therefore I'm not too disturbed by the idea.
All of this plus accessible free music, heh... sounds good to me.
If you put it this way, then you should not have access to medical care when you get older... since you are not contributing to the education of the youth today.
If everybody didn't have kids, there would be no country after this generation. This is why we need to help people that do have kids.
Your point seems really selfish to me.
(ps, I dont have kids yet, but I don't mind helping my neighbors educate their children)
Some download music, some don't. This is the same problem as levying CD media. Those who it is supposed to most benefit (starving artist musicians) are those who get screwed the most. They end up paying the levy in order to distribute their music and they never see a cent of it back. but implementation details matter. The implementation mechanism doesn't matter. If you're presuming every Canadian is guilty it doesn't matter how you do it. It's like passing a law that pi = 3. No matter how you write it and enforce it, it just isn't true.
After reading a bit more, I figure I gotta retract my original support for this proposal. Apparently (spoke to a friend of mine who's a musician up here in Canada) they would distribute the money collected from this based on CD sales. So yeah, those who said this was just a cash grab are 100% right.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
Of course all other things aren't equal. And internet connections aren't medicine.
But consider also the overhead of the respective systems. A nationalized health system needn't have the overhead of a massive health insurance industry. Neither the health insurance nor the government are affected by the pain and desperation of the person needing medical care, and a person in such a situation cannot reasonably bargain.
So capitalism is damned EVIL in this kind of a situation. (Not that we have it, exactly, in the US.)
The reports that I've seen say that the US spends more for inferior medical care. This isn't because the doctors don't want to do a good job, it's because of the massive overhead. Most money paid for health care stays with the health insurance companies. (That may be a slight overstatement.)
If there were universal health care for all basic services, then a vast bureaucracy could be eliminated, and a large number of very profitable jobs would disappear. Profitable, that is, to those that hold them, not to the country. They are providing a necessary service at an exorbitant cost. In this case a government agency could provide an equivalent level of services much more cheaply. Non-covered services would still need to be paid for, of course, but they would be the exception.
In the case of internet connections and music licensing, I would be very concerned over who would receive how much. And how one would "break into" being an "official musician". (Actually, the very concept of "official musician" is one I find disturbing...but it's inherent in the distribution of tax moneys to musicians.) I can conceive of ways in which this could be done fairly...but I'm cynical enough to doubt that this would happen were the US to follow this path.
E.g., the govt. could establish an "official download site" to which anyone could post anything, and to which they could attach a "performer payment address". Then the taxes collected could be distributed in proportion to the number of downloads from that server. Not totally fair, but close enough. And it allows for anonymous performances...but you don't get paid. It even allows for donations, e.g. "I dedicate the funds from this performance to the re-elect vice-president Chaney fund." Presumably at the download site one would be able to see who was benefiting from the download...and then decide to proceed or skip it.
But I'm too cynical to believe that currently entrenched interests would allow such a scheme to advance.
N.B.: Were such a scheme to be offered, it would be essential that the government's handling fee be a small (2%?) proportion of the funds passed on to the musicians...and that NONE of the money be available for other purposes. (Just like Social Security was supposed to be protected.) To protect this, no money should be allowed to accumulate. It should be distributed monthly so that it never became a pot of money large enough to be tempting to raid. But as I said, I'm too cynical to believe that such a scheme would have a chance.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
In my case, I think most music is crap (like 99.999% of it - I am a real musical fascist!!). These days I only buy 2 or 3 CDs a year (if that) I really like and I play these regularly along with my existing CD collection. That satisfies me.
When I'm not listening to my CDs, for background music I listen to Internet radio (by preferred genre but tracks I probably don't care enough about to download); I may occasionally hear an artist here that impresses me enough to consider buying a track but I haven't done so yet. I don't music download illegally.
So for that reason I don't wish to, and don't see why I should, pay an extra $5 a month for my broadband so that other people can download music I don't care for. Nice for them, but not for me.
I suppose if this were adopted I would probably download more music to make up for the extra cost; potentially, I might end up finding some more music I like but, even so, I highly doubt it would be enough justify the price of even half a CD. Also, I would not want to waste the disk or shelf space with MP3s/CDs I would hardly listen to.
I am afraid this solution does not work but for the musical junkie and those with a very low threshold in musical taste. Back to the drawing board, friends!
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
These guys are really slick. I have friends in retail management. They have recently been dinged by this outfit for playing the radio in their stores. Apparently, under their interpretation of the Canadian Copyright Act, this constitutes a public performance, and is subject to a royalty. One of my friends manages 6 high end wine merchants. SOAR approached him, and advised him they would settle for 50K for past infringement, and then would only charge them 2000.00 per store per year for the privilege to PLAY THE RADIO! His lawyer advised him to settle, and pay the licensing fee if he wanted to continue playing the radio in his stores. This all brought to by the same bandits that pushed through the CD levy on blank CD's. I fail to see the rationale that can conclude playing the radio constitutes a public performance. However, it would seem they do, and they evidently have managed to cajole, bully and intimidate a lot of businesses into bucking up the cash. As far as I am concerned, they are scum.
Excellent. :)
Kid-proof tablet..
Yes, freedom really is just too much bother. Far better to just do as the bureaucrats tell us.
When I lived in the UK, I was shocked to discover that everyone who owned a TV had to pay a £135.50/year "television tax" and that this only gave them something like 4 BBC channels and nothing else. If you had some form of cable or satellite, you still had to pay the fee even if you didn't use the BBC channels. I couldn't imagine how this system could be successful -- surely there was mass outrage and a blatant general disregarded for the rules! On the other hand, it made for excellent quality, commercial free programming. I would pay the same to get those channels here in Canada (not the wannabe BBC Canada version), and the natives seemed generally quite content to pay the fee.
Admittedly, we pay a lot of tax in Canada. As someone so astutely pointed out, we are vey good at it. I imagine that the perspective of many commenting from the US goes something like: "Another tax! What's next, a health care tax!? hahaha, those Canadians will never learn." Except taxes aren't always bad things. We tend to feel more comfortable paying taxes to support things like welfare programs and public healthcare even if we never use them because we realize that other people who live here do. Some people never have kids, does that mean they shouldn't have to pay tax to support education? We have already made that decision over and over, and that's why I live here and not in the Excited States of America.
Imagine that, instead of having to purchase your music from iTunes or steal it from IRC, you could go to a central repository where all the music was stored. Click the artist name, see all their albums. Click the album, see all the songs. Click the song and download. And, true to form, our astonishingly large bureaucracy would aggressively regulate this fee, which is what we pay them to do. Regulate things. I like the idea and I think it could work.
Guilty until proven innocent.
It ought to be against the law or charter of rights to just charge a levy on blank CD's to compensate for piracy,
and I hope to hell they don't do it for ISP's.
Yes musicians should be paid for their work. That doesn't mean we automatically assign blank fees to 100% of the population.
Should we add a gas tax for musicians too? Pirates had to drive to the store to buy blank CD Roms, seems fair doesn't it?
Bavarian Purity Law of Rice Krispie Squares: Rice Krispies, Marshmallows, Butter, Vanilla.
You're quite free to move to live elsewhere if you disagree with the taxation policies. You also seem to lack the basic grasp of how much effort is involved. I'm sure if you can come up with a way to do all the admin and sums involved without making tax returns and the resulting process even more complex and time consuming whilst also not introducing a hefty 'tax on tax' then your local government would love to hear from you.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
What if by default, all internet plans were officially shaped to reduce P2P traffic and we could choose to pay a premium surcharge to remove the shaping. The premium to be split up between the ISP (for increased bandwidth usage, even for currently legit P2P users) and several bodies representing the Movie TV and Music industries. If everything was above-board, the organisation of the files could be very good, so that the funds collected could be distributed back to the companies/artists relative to the amount of downloads on a monthly basis. In the interim, the Representative Bodies could collectively get the benefit of the "micropayments" to the fund. That way people who choose not to d/l copyrighted media aren't hit with any additional cost. Without doing all the maths, it seems like a system in which the only people losing out would be the current digital music vendors (iTunes etc) unless they jumped on the concept and provided the interface to achieve the same thing on a monthly subscription basis rather than the per song/album system.
I actually thought of this situation, since I have several data connections that have the same problem. I suggest here that business grade connections be exempt from this tax. My service provider has a distinct line in the sand to classify those connections, and the people that are they type to order them are usually smart enough to understand the policies of what is and what is not allowed.
It really wouldn't be fair to my employer to pay this tax for the dozen sites with high speed that don't even have PEOPLE!
Those who can, do.