Canada: Land Of The Free... P2P?
SimGuy
Ottawa, Canada
Canada: Land Of The Free... P2P?
$0.77 a CD tax? Not a problem. We already are the most heavily taxed nation in the world...
A desperate American recording industry is waging a fierce fight against digital copyright infringement seemingly oblivious to the fact that, for practical purposes, it lost the digital music sharing fight over five years ago. In Canada.
While hardware vendors whine about the levy, consumers seem fairly indifferent. Why? Arguably because the levy is fairly invisible - just another tax in an overtaxed country. And because it makes copying music legal in Canada.
A year before Shawn Fanning invented Napster, these amendments to Canada's Copyright Act were passed with earnest lobbying from the music business. The amendments were really about home taping. The rather cumbersome process of ripping a CD and then burning a copy was included as afterthought to deal with this acme of the digital revolution. The drafters and the music industry lobbyists never imagined full-on P2P access.
As the RIAA wages its increasingly desperate campaign of litigation in terrorum to try to take down the largest American file sharers on the various P2P networks, it seems to be utterly unaware of the radically different status of private copying in Canada.
This is a fatal oversight, because P2P networks are international. While the Digital Millennium Copyright Act may make it illegal to share copyright material in America, the Canadian Copyright Act expressly allows exactly the sort of copying which is at the base of the P2P revolution.
In fact, 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.
Every song on my hard drive comes from a CD in my collection or from a CD in someone else's collection which I have found on a P2P network. In either case I will have made the copy and will claim safe harbor under the "private copying" provision. If you find that song in my shared folder and make a copy this will also be "private copying." I have not made you a copy, rather you have downloaded the song yourself.
The premise of the RIAA's litigation is to go after the "supernodes," the people who have thousands, even tens of thousands of songs on their drives and whose big bandwidth allows massive sharing. The music biz has had some success bringing infringement claims under the DMCA. Critically, that success and the success of the current campaign hinges on it being a violation of the law to "share" music. At this point, in the United States, that is a legally contested question and that contest may take several years to fully play out in the Courts.
RIAA spokesperson Amanda Collins seemed unaware of the situation in Canada. "Our goal is deterrence. We are focused on uploaders in the US. Filing lawsuits against individuals making files available in the US."
Which will be a colossal waste of time because in Canada it is expressly legal to share music. If the RIAA were to somehow succeed in shutting down every "supernode" in America all this would do is transfer the traffic to the millions of file sharers in Canada. And, as 50% of Canadians on the net have broadband (as compared to 20% of Americans) Canadian file sharers are likely to be able to meet the demand.
The Canada Hole in the RIAA's strategic thinking is not likely to close. While Canadians are not very keen about seeing the copyright levy extended to other media or increased, there is not much political traction in the issue. There is no political interest at all in revisiting the Copyright Act. Any lobbying attempt by the RIAA to change the copyright rules in Canada would be met with a howl of anger from nationalist Canadians who are not willing to further reduce Canada's sovereignty. (These folks are still trying to get over NAFTA.)
Nor are there any plausible technical fixes short of banning any connections from American internet users to servers located in Canada.
As the RIAA's "sue your customer" campaign begins to run into stiffening opposition and serious procedural obstacles it may be time to think about a "Plan B". A small levy on storage media, say a penny a megabyte, would be more lucrative than trying to extract 60 million dollars from a music obsessed, file sharing, thirteen year-old.
If American consumers objected -- well, the music biz could always follow Southpark's lead and burst into a chorus of "Blame Canada". Hey, we can take it….We'll even lend you Anne Murray.
Source: NeoWin.net
$0.77 a CD tax? Not a problem. We already are the most heavily taxed nation in the world...
A desperate American recording industry is waging a fierce fight against digital copyright infringement seemingly oblivious to the fact that, for practical purposes, it lost the digital music sharing fight over five years ago. In Canada.
The Copyright Board of Canada administers the Copyright Act and sets the amount of the levies on blank recording media and determines which media will have levies imposed. Five years ago this seemed like a pretty good deal for the music industry: $0.77 CDN for a blank CD and .29 a blank tape, whether used for recording music or not. Found money for the music moguls who had been pretty disturbed that some of their product was being burned onto CDs. To date over 70 million dollars has been collected through the levy and there is a good possibility the levy will be raised and extended to MP3 players, flash memory cards and recordable DVDs sometime in 2003."On March 19, 1998, Part VIII of the (Canadian) Copyright Act dealing with private copying came into force. Until that time, copying any sound recording for almost any purpose infringed copyright, although, in practice, the prohibition was largely unenforceable. The amendment to the Act legalized copying of sound recordings of musical works onto audio recording media for the private use of the person who makes the copy (referred to as "private copying"). In addition, the amendment made provision for the imposition of a levy on blank audio recording media to compensate authors, performers and makers who own copyright in eligible sound recordings being copied for private use."
-- Copyright Board of Canada: Fact Sheet: Private Copying 1999-2000 Decision
While hardware vendors whine about the levy, consumers seem fairly indifferent. Why? Arguably because the levy is fairly invisible - just another tax in an overtaxed country. And because it makes copying music legal in Canada.
A year before Shawn Fanning invented Napster, these amendments to Canada's Copyright Act were passed with earnest lobbying from the music business. The amendments were really about home taping. The rather cumbersome process of ripping a CD and then burning a copy was included as afterthought to deal with this acme of the digital revolution. The drafters and the music industry lobbyists never imagined full-on P2P access.
As the RIAA wages its increasingly desperate campaign of litigation in terrorum to try to take down the largest American file sharers on the various P2P networks, it seems to be utterly unaware of the radically different status of private copying in Canada.
This is a fatal oversight, because P2P networks are international. While the Digital Millennium Copyright Act may make it illegal to share copyright material in America, the Canadian Copyright Act expressly allows exactly the sort of copying which is at the base of the P2P revolution.
In fact, 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.
Every song on my hard drive comes from a CD in my collection or from a CD in someone else's collection which I have found on a P2P network. In either case I will have made the copy and will claim safe harbor under the "private copying" provision. If you find that song in my shared folder and make a copy this will also be "private copying." I have not made you a copy, rather you have downloaded the song yourself.
The premise of the RIAA's litigation is to go after the "supernodes," the people who have thousands, even tens of thousands of songs on their drives and whose big bandwidth allows massive sharing. The music biz has had some success bringing infringement claims under the DMCA. Critically, that success and the success of the current campaign hinges on it being a violation of the law to "share" music. At this point, in the United States, that is a legally contested question and that contest may take several years to fully play out in the Courts.
RIAA spokesperson Amanda Collins seemed unaware of the situation in Canada. "Our goal is deterrence. We are focused on uploaders in the US. Filing lawsuits against individuals making files available in the US."
Which will be a colossal waste of time because in Canada it is expressly legal to share music. If the RIAA were to somehow succeed in shutting down every "supernode" in America all this would do is transfer the traffic to the millions of file sharers in Canada. And, as 50% of Canadians on the net have broadband (as compared to 20% of Americans) Canadian file sharers are likely to be able to meet the demand.
The Canada Hole in the RIAA's strategic thinking is not likely to close. While Canadians are not very keen about seeing the copyright levy extended to other media or increased, there is not much political traction in the issue. There is no political interest at all in revisiting the Copyright Act. Any lobbying attempt by the RIAA to change the copyright rules in Canada would be met with a howl of anger from nationalist Canadians who are not willing to further reduce Canada's sovereignty. (These folks are still trying to get over NAFTA.)
Nor are there any plausible technical fixes short of banning any connections from American internet users to servers located in Canada.
As the RIAA's "sue your customer" campaign begins to run into stiffening opposition and serious procedural obstacles it may be time to think about a "Plan B". A small levy on storage media, say a penny a megabyte, would be more lucrative than trying to extract 60 million dollars from a music obsessed, file sharing, thirteen year-old.
If American consumers objected -- well, the music biz could always follow Southpark's lead and burst into a chorus of "Blame Canada". Hey, we can take it….We'll even lend you Anne Murray.
Source: NeoWin.net
0
Comments
:canflag:
Very interesting. Thanks.
As for a tax levied on recording media, I am against in principle. Let's see, I'd have to pay the music industry for a product that I neither purchase legally nor download illegally. Wow, subsidizing others' commercial activities is just another form of welfare. But if it works for Canada, no problem with me. That was the decision of your fine, sovereign nation.
Sure, we may be vulnerable to civil litigation here in the U.S., but our recordable media costs half as much!
Wait.
That's still a raw deal.
Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww dammit.
Canadian copyright law pertains to Canadian works. The tax which is referred to in the article is not actually a "tax", but a levy, which is mentioned but not well explained in the article. Basically it is a tax by another name, which is paid to SOCAN, the body which protects Canadian musicians and performers. It's a very fine point, but a tax goes to a branch of gov't. Private bodies cannot tax, but they can levy, if authorized by the gov't. SOCAN is not a gov't agency, but a private, gov't authorized agency, therefore it has to be a levy, not a tax.
SOCAN is also charged with protecting the rights of international performers, and collecting any monies to be distributed to them (ie, royalty payments from Canadian radio stations who play music by US or other foreign performers.) This is, of course, providing that the country the performer is from is a member of the WTO.
But...if you look at section 26 of the
Canadian Copyright Act, you will see that a performer whose performance was peformed or "fixed" (recorded) in a country which is a member of the WTO, has the right, under sub-section 7, to prevent the reproduction of any fixation (recording) of their work.
In English, that means if an American performer, or their legal representative (ie, RIAA) tells SOCAN that they don't want anyone in Canada to copy their works, then that performance (ie, audio CD, or MP3 file on Kazaa) is not authorized to be reproduced in Canada (which, when it is downloaded or burned to a computer in Canada, it is reproduced.) Therefore, although the RIAA cannot lay suit against a Canadian citizen, they could take their case to the WTO courts with that logic, and compel the Canadian gov't agency responsible for enforcing international copyrights (SOCAN) to take measures to prevent us from copying music, whether that be laying suits, or passing laws.
At thsi point in time, that has not happened. Will it? Who knows. Canada is probably viewed as small potatoes by the RIAA. We have 1/10th of the population of the US, and many Americancs cannot name more than 2 or 3 Canadian provinces. Having a kid in Prince Edward Island fined or sued will not be an adequate deterrent to the larger US file-sharing public, especially if they have no clue where PEI is.
Interesting side note. The Blank Recording Media Levy is collected and payable to SOCAN, who then distribute it to Canadian artists based on their percentage of record sales and royalties in a given year. This means a couple of things:
1 - a kid who buys 10 CD-R's and fills them with MP3's pf Britney, Justin and Christina. His $2.31 in levy fees does not go to said artists. It goes to support Canadian musicians.
2 - Because it is based on a peformer's take of the national market and radio play for any given year, the best selling or highest played Canadian performers also see the most money back out of the levy. The small, struggling musician sees very little. And ironically, the small struggling musician is likely buying CD-R's to homer record and self-distribute their music, paying the levy, and not seeing any of it back.
3 - If you look at some of the top selling/playing Canadian musicians, you will find that very few of them reside in Canada. With a few exceptions like Shania Twain (Switzerland), and Bryan Adams (London....and he doesn't sell a lot of albums any more but he still gets lots of radio royalties therefore a healthy split of SOCAN revenues) you will find that most of our current top selling performers are living and working in the US. Alanis Morrisette, Celine (gag me) Dion, Diana Krall, Terri Clark, etc. Some talent is starting to stay based in Canada now, Bare Naked Ladies, Avril Lavigne, Swollen Members etc. But basically the big names have gone to New York, LA, Vegas, or Nashville because that is where the industry is the biggest. And SOCAN is helping to pay them to live their by taking money out of our Canadian pockets. Ironic, eh?
Dexter...