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Canadian Music Industry Calls For Internet Regulation, Website Blocking

An anonymous reader writes "Canadian law professor Michael Geist reports that the Canadian arm of the RIAA is calling for new Internet regulation, including website blocking and search result manipulation. While the Canadian music industry experienced increased digital sales last year (sales declined in the U.S.) and the Ontario government is handing out tens of millions of tax dollars to the industry, the industry now wants the government to step in with website blocking and ordering search companies to change their results to focus on iTunes and other sales sites."

2 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. They need to keep teens apart too by hawguy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If they are really worried about piracy, they need to keep teens apart -- one of my teenaged relatives has a half dozen or so usb drives laying around with songs he's traded with various friends -- She's got a music library of over 10,000 songs (though oddly, she only seems to listen to 10 of those, over and over again). They trade entire music libraries at school, thousands of songs at a time. So no matter how tightly they lock down the internet, music will continue to be traded.

    I'm a lost cause, the mainstream industry isn't likely to get much of my money no matter what they do. I'm well out of my teen years, and about the only albums I buy are for small regional artists, and I usually get them at concerts or direct from the artists. I already own several hundred CD's from the groups I listened to in my teens and 20's, and rarely hear a mainstream group I want to buy a CD from today -- Pandora and Spotify are good enough.

  2. Not a Canadian... by Voyager529 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...but I thought that the Canadian RIAA had a tax tacked onto blank storage media that was supposed to help pay for the pirated tracks. Did that disappear?