Canada Taxing Blank CDs?

Anonymous Coward writes "Canada has restarted talks on a tax of 74 cents per 15 minutes on digital recording media that is scheduled to begin on January 1st." It's interesting that when DAT was taxed, the format never caught on. Then again, CD-ROM is already a popular format. For more on the DAT issue, which this very closely parallels, RMS has an interesting article that appeared in Wired about 7 years ago, titled "The Right Way to Tax DAT".

Comments

I'm screwed

[SirSlud]

Oh, incidentally, I'm an independant musician. Now I get to spend another 2-4 dollars per blank CD that ends up in the pockets of succesful Canadian musicians. I'm really happy about that too. As an intelligent, cultured musician, I'm proud to say my tax dollars will end up in the pockets of such amazing Canadian musicians as:

Brian Adams
Celine Dion
Sarah McLaughlan

And yes, I'm being just a tiny bit sarcastic. Thank god for mp3.com

Hello, Reality's Over Here.

[Eric Seppanen]

A. It's impossible to determine whether a blank piece of media is destined to be used to duplicate copyrighted material.

B. At over $2 per CD-R, I'd buy my media from Afghanistan if I had to.

C. Copyrighted material can be stored on lots of other media- attempting to tax one media is a slippery slope... what, are you going to add a $200 tax on hard drives because you could store music on them?

A+B+C = somebody's smoking crack.

Here's the worst part

[DonkPunch]

Actually, it will end up in the pockets of the record companies who signed Brian Adams, Celine Dion, and Sarah McLaughlin. :P

You're dead-on right, though. Taxes or penalties on new media formats (be they CD-ROM, DAT, or MP3) HURT independent musicians. I've never ripped a CD to my DAT deck, but I've recorded a heck of a lot of original stuff with it.

Copyrights?

[_J_]

If blank CD's are taxed and these taxes go to artists for the inevitable copies that are going to be made of their music, does that make it OK for me to copy music to one of these blank CD's?

If I pay a surcharge on a CD to cover someone's copyrights, I think I should have the RIGHT to store music on that medium.

Just another thought

J:)