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Canadian Songwriters' Collective Licensing Bid Goes Voluntary

Posted by Soulskill on from the optional-taxes dept.

Last year, the Songwriters Association of Canada (SAC) proposed a plan to legalize the file sharing of copyrighted songs, which involved a small monthly fee to people using an internet connection. Critics of the plan complained that it amounted to another tax, and the Canadian recording industry said it violated copyright law. Now, as an anonymous reader writes, "The SAC has renewed its bid to legalize peer-to-peer file sharing in return for a levy on Internet service. The SAC is now calling for the plan to be voluntary, with both consumers and creators having the right to opt-out. ACTRA, the leading performer group in Canada, now says it is also supportive of a legalized approach with the prospect of extending the plan to video sharing."

4 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Letting artists opt-out makes sense by JesseMcDonald · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Letting individual copyright holders opt-out makes the proposal useless. The entire point was that, for a small monthly tax, people wouldn't have to worry about copyrights so far as non-commercial, personal use was concerned. If it doesn't apply to all copyrighted content, though, the resulting situation wouldn't be much different than what we have now; people would still run the risk of a lawsuit every time they shared something. (You don't expect anyone to actually check the lists, right? Even assuming they're even published in an accessible fashion, if people are paying a monthly "file sharing" tax they're going to expect access to everything.)

    --
    "The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
  2. Just like the Blank CD levy.. by denis-The-menace · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No artist gets paid.

    I wish somebody could get a video of Avril Lavigne's answer to: "Did you get your cheque for your portion of the Blank CD levy?"

    --
    Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
  3. Great, Just let me Opt-Out by arthurpaliden · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I do not unlawfully download copyrighted content so why must I pay the tax. I already have to pay a tax on my CD's that I use for backups of my own personal stuff.

    --
    Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
  4. Opt-out or not, a tax is the WORST approach. by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Here are the problems with a tax on internet to support copyright (which is what this amounts to):

    (1) Most of the money comes from people who are not filesharing. So the many are punished for the deeds of the few. This is a bankrupt philosophy.

    (2) You know very well that little if any of the money will go to the artists. So what's the point?

    (3) It does absolutely nothing to solve the "problem".

    The money comes from the wrong place, it will go to the wrong place, and it solves nothing. So what is this for?