Joho the Blog
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September 20, 2003
Michael O'Connor Clarke, Ireland's gift to Canada, writes:
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:
Loophole or proof of the sly wisdom of those snow-shod Canadians? Posted
by D. Weinberger at September 20, 2003 08:35 AM
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Comments
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
Posted by: Ton Zijlstra | September 20, 2003 11:02 AM
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)
Posted by: Jordon Cooper | September 20, 2003 01:43 PM
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.
Posted by: elliot noss | September 21, 2003 09:39 AM
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:
Posted by: Bill Seitz | September 25, 2003 11:55 AM
oops my link got hidden - see http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/z2002-04-26-f
Posted by: Bill Seitz | September 25, 2003 11:55 AM
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?
Posted by: David | January 13, 2004 09:31 AM