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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."
Of course not. They want their cake, and to be able to eat it to.
Actually, they want our cake, and they want the government to entrench their business mode, and generally spoil the internet to benefit them.
This is buggy-whip makers trying to get laws passed which says the roads need to be taxed and regulated to support their business model.
And, history tells me, it's US lobbying companies footing some of the bill for this, and 'helpfully' writing the wish-list of things they'd like to see. And, then once they've forced someone else to adopt it, they go back to US lawmakers and say "see, we're lagging behind on regulations like everybody else".
The power of political lobbying is the problem here, because wealthy organizations pay for better access to politicians than the rest of us get.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
There's a wonderful device, perhaps a decade and a half old, commonly called an MP3 player (although more accurately termed a mobile digital media player (M-DMP), portable media player (PMP), or similar). It's a portable electronic device with which one may store and play back digitally-encoded audio tracks, including music, podcasts, audio books, etc. These devices can store between hours and months of audio, depending on their storage capacity, and can often offer continuous playback for a full day before needing to be recharged (since many are equipped with rechargeable batteries).
The device will, however, only play tracks that you load onto it, so it's a little weak in terms of music discovery (unless you load it with tracks by artists that you consider candidates for addition to your listening collection). You can use it to evaluate artists recommended to you by your friends, by your "friends", by strangers, by "strangers", or by rutting rhinoceroses, or by any other person, place, thing, or idea with which/whom you communicate, provided you load the music onto the device ahead of time. Because gasp there are other ways to get noise into your ear-holes besides reception of frequency-modulated radio waves or by use of a mobile's data plan. Who'da thunk it?
They charged a tax on all storage media regardless of if any music bytes were ever spilled on it. However, I would imagine that the sales of CD/DVD media is quickly drying up, they they are not making their pound of flesh. They still get it from devices, but they don't provide the numbers. It was easy to see 5 years ago that everything would be moving to online content both music and movies, and that physical media is pretty provincial. So now comes the next big fight, trying to force legislate profits from the internet. How? Regulation of course. Nothing new here, give us free money.