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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."
So, basically a gun to people's heads while the other hand rifles through their pockets.
Greed. The one thing that's in truly infinite supply.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
They get a tax subsidy in Canada, new copyright legislation protecting broken-in-principle DRM and now they want search engines -- which make more money than them -- to be subservient to their industry. Wonderful.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
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.
One word: Bieber
From the Fine Article ...
Music is becoming a hobby, not a career.
Translation: "We can no longer buy popularity with pop music and no longer manufacture the latest fad of boy-bands or girl-bands. These indie bands can do it cheaper, and that cuts us, the middle man, out of the picture! We don't get our fair share from YouTube, etc."
"Oh Noes! People are using this internet to freely share things and we aren't getting our cut ! Must maintain artificial scarcity of the source else we can't over-charge for numbers! Suckers! Er, mean, 'customers'."
Never mind the fact that the easier it is for people to find music, video, that is akin to free advertising.
Nah, let's shit on our potential customers and treat them like pseudo-thieves because "How dare they share something they value with someone else!"
Only cowards use censorship
Don't put us all in the same basket please. There's the Harper government and the idiots who elected them, and then there's the rest of us who just want them to fuck off and leave the country alone before we turn into the US but worse. There was a time where Canada was a leader in diplomacy, environment, science, copyright, social policies and much more. Now we're slaves to whatever industry Harper is licking the butt of at the time, any other consideration (such as the well-being of the citizens under his charge or the reputation of Canada outside of his cabinet) be damned.
...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?
Just make music trading paraphernalia illegal
This is the TRUE solution. CD/DVDs, USB sticks and drives, computers.
All of if has to go. Shutdown the libraries. Burn the contents.
We MUST go back to the 50s where all music came from the good old music labels. They know good music and how to make it.
The church of Profits commands you! /S
It for the good of unborn artists in the future.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
The recording industry, the biggest bunch of middleman thieves ever, is finally losing its free ride. You don't NEED a record company anymore, you can be your own! If they didn't think they were dying they wouldn't be violently throwing tantrums everywhere - lobbying for really radical unilateral changes to the law, suing regular everyday people for "piracy" to the point of bankruptcy, hassling bars/restaurants (usually mom and pop operations, barely making it as it is) into paying commercial licensing fees for music, etc.
A band now can cut their own album and sell it on iTunes, Amazon or a host of other music sites and retain a lot more of the proceeds. Back in the day even large, famous acts were getting stiffed by the record companies! Thanks in part to the way that record companies have pushed musicians up against the wall now for many years the market is now to a point where the artists don't even make money on the albums themselves. Instead they make the money at concerts, both on tickets and on merchandise. An artist now almost has to *give away* the music (many seem to - look on Youtube for all of the "full album" videos) as the loss leader in hopes of getting people to their concert. Artists can post samples on Youtube (at no cost) to drive sales and exposure. The record company middleman has less and less importance in a marketplace like this.
I'm glad to see that more and more musicians are standing up for themselves and taking advantage of the offerings that don't involve RIAA-related entities. If the entity doesn't add value they shouldn't have a role in the marketplace anymore.
Now you know how U.S. Americans feel when everyone lumps us all together, as if we're all cool with the corporatist pricks who get elected these days.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
I assume that if all these governments from around the globe have successfully 'blocked' all these nasty web sites offering pirated content, then it stands to reason that the recording industries tax on blank media no longer would be appropriate or relevant, so we can have cheaper blank media again?
All the music I listen to is 100% free to download.
How do people usually find out about these recording artists who offer their own professional-quality music for download at no charge? Virtually none of the music played on FCC-licensed U.S. FM stations is free as in speech or free as in beer, and I doubt CRTC-licensed Canadian FM stations differ.
Well... there you have it. People who are still limiting themselves to FM transmissions are missing out.
For the rest of us, new music is promoted through social media and "if you listen to this, you might also like...." on streaming radio. Just using Google does amazingly well too.
And then, of course, there's the fact that CBC Radio 2 picks up a lot of independent music, and provides links to the band's websites on their site, along with a historical playlist so you can find the songs/artists you listened to earlier in the day on FM, if you're into that.