Are there no Canadian pirates?
Michael O’Connor Clarke, Ireland’s gift to Canada, writes:
Could P2P music sharing actually be considered legal in Canada? This tech journalist thinks so, and he makes an interesting argument. He’s not a lawyer, of course – but it’s an entertaining thought.
Apparently, five years ago, Canada legalized copying of copyrighted material for private use, levying a fee on blank CDs and audio tapes of $0.77 CDN and $0.29 respectively to compensate the studios. So far, that’s raised $70M. According to the article:
… you could not have designed a law which more perfectly captures the peer to peer process. “Private copying” is a term of art in the Act. In Canada, if I own a CD and you borrow it and make a copy of it that is legal private copying; however, if I make you a copy of that same CD and give it to you that would be infringement. Odd, but ideal for protecting file sharers.
Loophole or proof of the sly wisdom of those snow-shod Canadians?
Categories: Uncategorized dw
Hi David,
In the Netherlands a similar arrangement was made for clean cassette-tapes. I always assumed the same went for recordable CD’s. But as the music industry is trying to catch filesharers here now as well, probably not. Even though they have postponed going after ‘small-time’ file sharers, on the grounds that no legal alternative is widely available yet. The latter is an interesting approach I think.
Cheers,
Ton
RIAA Asks: What’s A Canadian Pirate?
David Weinberger asks Are there no Canadian pirates?Apparently, five years ago, Canada legalized copying of copyrighted material for private use, levying a fee on blank CDs and audio tapes of $0.77 CDN and $0.29 respectively to compensate the studios. …
Despite the fact that I curse the levy everytime I buy a stack of CDR’s (I don’t fileshare), I have to think it was a great piece of legislation. It allows for a lot of guilt free distribution of CD’s (and it is cold here already so we need something to pass away the winter)
loophole. CRIA, the Canadian equivalent of the RIAA, has been quoted in the press nearly daily in Canadian coverage of the “RIAA sues 8 yr-old for milk money” stories. CRIA has desperately tried to maintain a sense of threat along the lines of “we may, we are looking, we are thinking, don’t think because you are North of the border we won’t”.
CRIA is, in fact, more powerful relatively speaking then the RIAA because we lucky Canadians have all of those strong “cultural protection” programs (a more Orwellian group of organizations it is harder to find). Thus, there is huge government infrastructure within which CRIA is an important invitee to all the parties. and we all know parties drive politics (pun intended), at least in Canada.
If the RIAA has success, CRIA will follow. If the RIAA is publically embarassed, as they should be, CRIA will denounce. If they choose to follow, their Shila Copps-led government lackeys will support them.
Canada immune from enforcement?
Here we go again. After the Globe and Mail, Tech Central station is letting the scoop out to the Slashdot…
But how is the money from that tax distributed? How much gets to artists?
If you’re a new performer and you home-bake a bunch of CDs of your stuff to give away, you pay a tax on the blank media. Justin Timberlake makes more money than you do.
Some notes about the US tax on tape:
oops my link got hidden – see http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/z2002-04-26-f
This code should compile and run just fine, and you should see no changes in how the program works. So why did we do all of that?