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MP3 Player Tax Proposed In Canada
Interoperable writes "The status of sharing music in Canada is, to some extent, ambiguous. This is partly due to a levy imposed on blank media, CD-Rs and cassette tapes, that compensates artists and the recording studios for a loss of revenue due to copying. Legislation proposed by the NDP and supported by the Bloc Quebecois would extend that levy to cover MP3 players with the intent of decriminalizing audio file sharing for Canadian citizens. The proposed legislation, however, faces opposition from the governing Conservative party; the Liberal party has agreed to discuss the proposed bill."
First poost, eh?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
A little bit extra for an aweful lot more - this makes perfectly reasonable sense. Lets just hope the money gets to the struggling artists!
Just saying... :)
SIG: HUP
Indepedent artists are still left out in the cold.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
They pay a copying tax every time they buy media. It seems to me this implies copying is then legal.
However, with common sense and government, only occasionally do the two meet.
It's nice that we don't face the same persecution the Yanks face from the MAFIAA, I like my shared music... And healthcare ;)
But this system will alienate the one or two people who do still pay for music and cause them to re-evaluate their position on piracy. If it's justified through yet another tax, then why pay for music at all? And... what's the difference between music, movies and games? A bitstream by any other name is still just a bitstream.
How much work could a network work if a network could net work?
I wish they would do this with my rolling papers and decriminalize non-medicinal marijuana!
The Conservatives are opposed to the bill, and currently they have 145/308 seats in the House of Commons.
They only have to convince 9 of the Liberals, NDP, or Bloc to agree.
Not everything is voted on party lines, but most is. It is likely the conservatives will have to make a concession in some other form to get the Liberals to side with them. And that is extremely likely, because the Liberals no longer hold the threatening role they had a couple months ago.
Yes, I am Canadian.
Hasn't the runaway success of services like iTunes and Amazon MP3 and all the rest of them mitigated the need to play this game where we supposedly all obtain our music illegally and have to pay for it with levies on media and devices?
Right, sorry, I forgot, the Soviet Socialist Republic of Record Labels wants its $20 cut of my iPhone/Nexus One/Pre/etc. And boy do they deserve it, considering the depth and genius of the cultural patrimony they've contributed. Like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.
The bill being put forward by a member of parliament from the NDP, who are at the opposite end of the political spectrum from the governing Conservative parties. It will not get enought support to make it past first reading - it would need the support of the largest opposition party, the Liberals, and they're likely to just ignore it, because politically, it looks like a tax. Also, because there's finances involved, passing the legislation might be considered a confidence vote which would bring down the government and trigger an election, and this just isn't an issue the Liberals want us going to the polls over. Canada once did have an "ipod tax" of the sort proposed. The "private copying" regime in Canada makes it legal (i.e. not a violation of copyright) to copy music (but not movies, or non-musical audio recordings) for private use onto an "audio recording media". The flip side of the legislation is that a levy (tax) is imposed on "audio recording media" to compensate recording artists for the copies of their music that are copied in this way. For example, there's a levy of about 30 cents per blank CD. However, because the law doesn't model technology very well, there is no levy on blank DVDs, and when they tried to impose a levy on MP3 players several years ago, the Court struck it down, concluding that an MP3 player is not "audio recording media". Hard drives, similarly, are not "audio recording media" because they can hold anything, not just audio. Like I said, the law doesn't model technology very well.
They want to criminalize most forms of private copying in the digital age anyways, so it wouldn't make any sense to continue to have a levy for something that is illegal (contrary to what a lot of people think, the current levy only exists to compensate for private use copying, which is perfectly legal, not piracy).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Sorry, but I already pay for CDs in stores, which I convert to MP3 using iTunes, then read them on my iPod. Don't want to pay a tax for something I already paid. I sometimes buy individual tunes from the Apple store when I know the album is not good except for one or two songs.
I never download pirated content, and I don't want to pay for all those who do.
Let's have a tax on crowbars, because some will use it to break into houses and not be caught. And a new tax on automobiles, because some will go through red lights and not be caught. And a new tax on shoes, because some people will jaywalk and not be caught. And a tax on thinking because some will commit thought crimes and not be caught.
Seriously, it boggles the mind that the media corporations have managed to brainwash people sufficiently that they have politicians proposing a tax that enables them to be paid _FOR DOING NOTHING!_ Just because they exist, they expect to be paid. It's a degree of entitlement that my brain has troubles comprehending. I want to rant more but I'm just too flabbergasted to be able to put together a coherent sentence... I clearly went into the wrong industry - I actually have to work for my pay check. I should have gone into music distribution where I can get paid just for being there.
Seriously, the media companies (music, first and foremost among them since the RIAA and CRIA are the most antagonistic of them) need to fuck off. Eh.
Hmmm.... I don't own an MP3 player. Any MP3 files I might have are stored on my hard disk drive. If I wanted to play them on an MP3 player I'd probably build one myself (plans are available on the Internet) and store the MP3s on a USB drive. Surprising that they are stopping at simple MP3 players (which tend to be overpriced anyway) and not going after any and all data storage devices.
Broken model --> Broken solutions.
If (assuming you are a Canadian) the government were to impose a tax to cover the lost revenue of audio file sharing then the industry would have a hard time winning a lawsuit claiming that you "pirated" the files, when, in fact, you paid for them already through such a tax. Therefore if you pay for an iTunes version of an MP3 instead of downloading one from your friend down the street you are double paying.
The original article mentions the tax is also proposed for computers.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
You must help me! I am the Prince of Newfoundland, wrongfully imprisoned for having hidden a stash of illegal mp3s from thousands of your favorite artists. If you email me back with your personal bank info, I shall split my mp3 stash with you. This is not a scam! (*legal disclaimer* this is totally a scam)
Whether the measure is effective or not does not matter in the first place. What matters in the first place, is having laws that make sense. Here, there is perfect sense in "decriminalizing". Only after the Canadians have actually got the law, they will need to look into ways to enforce it. Way to go, Canada !!
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Amen, brother.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
I'm more interested in the other private members bill, the one that would expand the definition of fair-dealing.
Magic doesn't work in my presence. My power of disbelief is too strong.
Unfortunately governments don't think that way - I pay for BBC programmes to be made with my license fee but if I want the box set of the latest comedy or drama series I still have to pay them again. Moreover this tax hits everyone regardless of how they plan to use the media. They have sucessfully criminalised the entire media buying population by insinuating that they all intend to pirate, and while it might be convenient for those who did intend to pirate, it's hardly a fair or just way to handle the situation.
This is partly due to a levy imposed on blank media, CD-Rs and cassette tapes,
So, blank CD-Rs and tapes are somehow different than "blank media"?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Parkinson's Law, theorized by C. Northcote Parkinson, a British Royal Navy historian and author, explains this phenomenon by stating that "work expands to fill the time available for its completion" and in bureaucratic organizations, the number of people required to do the work will continually rise whether the actual volume of work stays the same, increases, decreases or disappears.
The question is how much do Canadian artists get handed from the government in the existing "tax the media" scheme? I'd warrant they don't get anything and that the government keeps track of what they collect and injects "money into supporting artists, including more money for the Canada Council for the Arts and the Canada Music Fund." (from TFA). I mean, what else could they do? Say I was a terrible artist (not too much of a stretch) and I put out a terrible album with nothing on it that anybody would want. Do I have my hand out for the MP3 tax? How much would the government give me? How would they determine that?
They can't. And they don't. This is a stupid idea based on another stupid idea.
Want to see what they do with the money?
So they tax our media. Then they give it to bureaucratic organizations that consume themselves. And the indy rock band gets? You guessed it. The shaft. And we are proposing to extend this to new media. Excellent. Let me just get out my wallet...
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
The last time I even bothered looking into it, which was probably 5 years ago, they were selling music and data CDs as separate products and the levy only applied to music CDs and not data CDs.
Seems like a small price to pay to get the MAFIAA off the case and out of the legal system (I'm sure they're already draining more money from you in taxes than you'll ever pay on mp3 player tax).
No sig today...
Expansion to the definition of fair-dealing is included in this bill. The headline and description only chooses to focus on the levy aspect/
Please can we stop worrying about the artists already? Someone has to start thinking of the struggling lawyers and politicians.
In Spain we have this levy for blank media but not only CD and DVD but also USB flash sticks, memory cards, hard disks and doesn't end there: It also applies to Optical media recorders and MP3 players. If you can read Spanish it's explained here http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_por_copia_privada_(Espa%C3%B1a). And after all of this you'd think this would legalize filesharing ....it doesn't. This is supposedly a compensation for "private copy" which is something like making a copy from the original media for your personal use (for example copying an audio cd you bought to use it in the car and prevent the original one to get damaged).
Of course the politicians are in bed with the intellectual rights societies (SGAE is the most important here) so this is unlikely to get better in the coming years.
I participated in the effort to defeat this same proposal in 2002-2004. However these guys never quit. The good news is that they aren't particularly inspired – or inspiring.
It's noteworthy that I found out about the last go-around of this effort by the Canadian Private Copying Collective on Slashdot.
Fortunately I only play Oggs.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Are you actually using iTunes and an iPod and still using MP3 anyway? Or did you just say "MP3" to stay generic? You do know that AAC is better than MP3, right?
The problem here is that you have already bought the corporate propaganda that this is "pirating". The point of the levy is that sharing music in Canada is legal. This has been shown in court.
So pay the levy, and don't feel bad about sharing CD's with friends, or trading mp3.
People on Windows, who have to live with Adobe Acrobat.
How? Foxit Reader > Adobe Reader.
So long as you are a member of SOCAN and have music tracked by SoundScan, you're eligible for the levies
So if you happen not to be Canadian yet are the author of music that has been copied in Canada, how do you get into SOCAN? And it appears you need a UPC to get into SoundScan, and to get a UPC, you need at least some sort of label (even if not major). Besides, I didn't see anything on your flowchart about download sales (e.g. iTunes Store).
Get us this option, please.
When you buy from iTunes, Amazon, you (probably) have the expressed written consent (i.e., end user agreement) to copy to music to a music playing device device.
Sites like Magnatune give you a licence to copy to as many devices as you like (even other people's devices).
The tax doesn't cover file sharing. It only covers private copying of purchased music to a blank cd or, in this case, an mp3 player. This is no longer the only way, or likely the most common way, to fill up a mp3 player, so taxing them as such is just plain dumb.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
It amuses me how the "artists" are changing their business model from actually having to sell stuff (and make it good enough for anyone to want it) to something that boils down to a private tax on certain products...
it looks like a clever way for the government to be the major source of income for artists, that way they can remove funding from artists that rebel against the system.
Actually, call me a jaded old cynic, but what makes anyone think it would be different from the other levies?
When the main medium of sharing were cassettes or CDs, did introducing those levies actually cause copying a cassette or CD to be decriminalized? Or I'm pretty sure I'm paying such an extra already both for DVD blanks and for any DVD burner I've ever bought. Does that cause them to even stop stop wasting my time with that "you wouldn't steal a car" anti-piracy warning on DVD's.
Essentially I pay the levy _and_ get to be treated like a pirate, whether I actually pirate anything or not. And TBH it's the "or not" part that bothers me the most, but either is fundamentally wrong. We're basically taxed to pay those guys to make up for piracy, but don't actually get anything in return.
It's essentially like, say, as if everyone in town gets to pay 5 bucks to Joe Landlord, owner of a nice orchard, for the fact that (supposedly) some people trespass on it and misuse it as a picnick ground. But basically nobody gets anything in exchange for those 5 bucks. It's still forbidden to trespass there, and Joe Landlord still gets to sue anyone he catches there. Then what are we paying for? And why is the town essentially subsidizing Joe's orchard?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
How many
http://news.cnet.com/No-iPod-tax-for-Canada/2100-1041_3-5809117.html
times
http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/story.html?id=235987
are they going to try and bring this tax in? This has to be the 3rd or 4th time this has come up.
Actually rape is about as natural as you get.
The point is that no matter what the levy, in today's wired world the only losers would be the Canadian retail sellers of such items - because any levy would be enough to more than pay for the shipping of a unit from outside the country - so neither the musicians nor the retailers would profit.
kind of makes me wonder if it is the US resellers who are behind this ;)
Been there, done that, paid for the T-shirt
and didn't get it
There's already a tax on MP3 players in Canada. This is a new tax they're proposing, meaning we will now be taxed twice on an MP3 player. Why hasn't this been mentioned yet by the stupid news reporters?
"if not blocked by the DMCA" is the caveat to that
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act has explicit exceptions (17 USC 1201(k)(3)) for some types of analog reconversion of music and video.
most of my music comes from people like me, guys or gals just putting stuff together in their bedroom.
True, the major record labels doesn't get a cut from your homemade recordings, but that's because the record labels technically own copyright only in the sound recording, not the underlying musical work. But how are you sure that major music publishers don't own copyright in the musical work, the sequence of notes that you're recording?
Exactly. There should not be a difference legally between sharing my songs with my friends on the internet or burning them a CD and mailing it to them. It is not for a private corporation to decide what I do with the music I buy from them. Corporations do not (officially) make laws.
I sure wish Americans would cease their bull-headed notions that their way of thinking applies to the entire world, especially when their sense of entitlement has painted them all into a copyright corner.
Does anyone really believe that millions of Americans aren't enjoying Canadian bittorrent sites? Seriously?
... someone that pays for all of their music, without exception, I would certainly welcome such a tax. However I'd move to just copying everything instead of buying it. I wouldn't pay for my music twice ; )
I'm pretty sure most other people would feel the same way. Doing this essentially socializes entertainment since the government becomes the record store.
I'm pretty sure that doing this will result in a net loss for the music industry... There's no way people will buy their music unless they are idiots since this tax sanctions copying. People will just form music clubs where you can copy whatever you want without buying it.
Record stores could simply burn mix cds for people. It's not online, the record store owner is simply copying with friends right?
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Geez Danny, getting surgery south of the border and now this? We may have to revoked your Canadian license.
Actually, TFS says they want to
So they specifically *don't* want to make criminals of people for this infraction.
You are "distributing" the music when you copy it from your computer to the mp3 player. You are no longer just a downloader, you are uploading it to the player.
Now that they're doing this for mp3 players (and I'm sure, PMPs in general),
This isn't new at all, they're just trying harder to legalize it. I paid a levy on my iPod Mini in 2004. It was later refunded when the levy was overturned.
http://news.cnet.com/No-iPod-tax-for-Canada/2100-1041_3-5809117.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/17/canada_ipod_tax_illegal/
Then they tried again in 2007.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2007/07/copyright-board-of-canada-gives-thumbs-up-to-ipod-tax.ars
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/01/ipod-tax-smacked-down-in-canada.ars
So it's on about a three year cycle.
>> (I would happily pay a few bucks extra a month to get a pirate's licence, by the way)
Once you pay the licence fee, you are not a pirate anymore. You would be called a privateer, in the employ of Her Majesty. However, do remember to carry your letters of marque on you while outside our territorial waters.
I would like to die like my grandfather did - sleeping. And not screaming in terror, like his passengers.
Finally some stupid levy idea that does not cause me to pay for something I don't use.
MP3 players will have a levy on them? Go right ahead. Can we please get rid of the other levies though, like on hard drives and blank DVDs? I don't own an mp3 player, so it does not concern me, but I don't listen to music at all, and the other levies are definitely a discrimination against myself and the other people who do not download or listen to music but who do buy blank media and hard-drives.
Thanks, idiots in the government.
You can't handle the truth.
apparently you didnt have any marketing, or production planning, or any kind of optimization course.
those prices are calculated as the MAXIMUM price they can sell a product over, in optimum numbers. they may be selling much more and making much more money by a lower price, but this is a method few corporations choose. rather, the aim is to sell minimum amounts of product from the maximum price possible, while targeting for a certain market share.
if you are a media cartel, market share is 100% and you dont need to lose it. all media companies are in the same basket, since they arrange their prices to fit each others' accordingly. you dont find emi selling songs from $0.2 while others sell them from $1. so all illusions and delusions of 'free market' and 'competition', are void and null.
especially when it comes to digital songs. basically the costs of reproducing these and distributing are close to nil. even less than printing cds. yet they are still sold over $1, because companies think that this is a price they think market can accept and they can get away with. and despite all the reductions in cost, there is no sign of any company cutting down their prices. they are selling songs with exorbitant profit margins online. and its not one or two company, all of them are doing it. and no antitrust watchdog, or government agency is going after them.
it is another sign why the current system is beyond medieval, and why we desperately need piracy to sort it out.
Read radical news here
Some baseless rambling by a non-governing member of the opposition. The government of the day is against the idea completely. He could introduce a Private Member's Bill, but let me put it this way:
You could lose a finger for every Private Member's Bill that made it into law in Canada in the last 100 years, and still be able to touch type 60 wpm.
Copying is ALREADY legal, irrespective of the levy. This is the biggest problem with the levy.
Downloading music is NOT illegal. Uploading music IS illegal. Leaving the music sitting around with your file sharing client open is NOT illegal, because you're not actively giving it to someone. It's murky and weird.
If there was a levy on bullets so that we compensated the families of victims of gun crimes, it wouldn't make shooting people legal.
This is one of MANY reasons why the levy is a terrible idea. It gives people the idea that copyright infringement is now both legal and, to an extent, moral. If they've paid up front, why NOT download music?
I pay for all my music. The music has value to me. To charge ME a levy is the height of bad planning. Why should I bother paying for my music in a normal way (like the iTunes music store, for instance) if I've kind of already paid for it through this device tax?
It's a poorly thought out system. I'm all for compensating artists (obviously, if I'm the kind of person that pays for the music at a time where it's so easily acquired for free), but there has to be a better way than over-charging people like me, and under-charging those that download indiscriminately. It's a money grab for an industry and system that are antiquated.