Canadian Copyright Group Wants iPod Tax

soulxtc writes "Unable to define memory as a 'recording medium,' Canada's Private Copyright Collective goes directly after portable music player devices, memory cards, and anything else that can be used to make private copies. The PCC submitted a proposal to the country's Copyright Board that suggests levies of $5 (Canadian) on devices with up to 1GB of memory, $25 for 1-10 GB, $50 for 10-30 GB, and $75 for over 30 GB. If approved, this propoal would increase the price of a 30-GB iPod by 26%. These collections are intended to compensate artists and labels for the losses they suffer when people 'illegally' copy or transfer music. The PCC is also seeking a new $2 to $10 tax on memory cards. The backbone of digital photography has become tangled up in the fight for making sure music companies get every nickel and dime they feel that they deserve."

Hey Canadians...

[tsm_sf]

Is the fee you currently pay on blank CDs considered a license to burn whatever you want?

What about the other memory?

[ezratrumpet]

I know musicians who can reproduce a musical score after only one hearing. Are we going to find a way to control them? What's more - they have virtually limitless memory.

Someone call someone before the fabric of society is torn!

Re:You've gotta be shitting me

[Derek Loev]

According to this article" [com.com] music sharing does not kill CD sales due to the fact that those that download music would not likely buy it in the first place. MP3 Players and P2P software have become the scapegoat of the music industry. They are trying to compensate for something they caused (by releasing music overpriced and more) by taking away from the consumer. It's completely ridiculous.

What's more...

[Kythe]

...considering that you could fit maybe 250 128 bps mp3's on a 1 GB iPod (that comes to about $.02 per song), I guess we know now how much people should be penalized for illegal music sharing.

Re:Hey Canadians...

[Anonymous Coward]

This fee should have been targeted on sales of units in bulk. The duplicators should have been targeted, not those who by spindles of 50 or even 100. Those people are not the ones responsible for the majority of the pirating.

Re:misleading headline and writeup

[tomhudson]

They've also been sounding out the idea of a levy on hard drives.

Where's my brother's money, dammit?

[swordgeek]

My brother is a full-time professional musician in Alberta, and has been now for about 20 years. It's not an easy job, but it's his love and his passion.

He's now been an artist on about six albums over the years, one of which was nominated for a Juno. Why, pray tell, has he not gotten a single bloody cent from this tariff?

If I didn't know better, I'd almost believe that the point of it isn't actually to reward the musicians! But of course, that's just crazy talk.

Re:Hey Canadians...

[Anonymous Coward]

So can I order CD's or memory cards from canada,
ship them to the US, and then copy all the music I want onto them? :P

I think I could live with 5 to 10 cents a song...

Wait, I forgot to account for the RIAA border crossing tax in there too. oh well...

Re:Why do I need to pay this? I buy my music @ iTM

[Undefined Parameter]

I have a better question: If this becomes Canadian law, does that mean that Apple's iTMS and other MP3 stores start providing their content free to Canadian individuals, but start charging the labels/artists per song?

It's a global thing I guess. :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like local versions of these interest groups in other countries, are lobbying for similar taxes. sometimes they get away with it, sometimes they don't. The all have the same thing in common that they lack any form of PR skills. :)

There have been a game going on for years here in Europe, fx in Denmark the price of a blank CD or DVD were at one point 5-10 times higher than the same product in Germany. So of course people would just buy a spindle when on vacation og ordering it on the internet and save a lot of money. I believe that the price today still is like 3 times higher in DK. about 1$ for 1 DVD.
Example in Danish and Kr. http://www.edbpriser.dk/Products/Listprices.asp?ID =175201 [edbpriser.dk]
(se) eq. online shop in Sweden. (de) eq. shop in Germany. fragt=delivery, pris=price, total=price incl. delivery.
The shop in the bottom are a local/national shop, hence the 3x price.

So all they gained from the tax was that everyone who aren't stupid, are buying their media in bulk from abroad. and then they get 0%. Even when I bought a DVD burner in a store they advised me not to buy the DVDs in their shop(they also only had small selection even tough it was a huge store), but order them online from Germany instead.

Re:Should I move to Canda?

[acidrain]

So, this means that I get to download anything I want while in Canada free of guilt and cost... right?

Actually yeah. In Canada we pay a small tax on blank tapes and a special kind of recordable cd that nobody buys. The upside is that it is perfectly legal for Canadians to share their music with each other and to download music off the internet. Making files available on the web is brodcasting and therefore illegal, and charging money for copying is also illegal. However, if you want to set up an mp3 server at work, there is no law preventing that.

What it comes down to is you cannot tax illegal behaviour. Our courts would never accept it. So this isn't that scary, in that there an upside because they also enshrine the right to share music with those players. As for digital photography? That would result in too many pissed off taxpayers. Probably the worst would be some brand of memory card being released with an absurd tax just like for cds. And it will quietly be ignored by consumers, if they ever see it.

Finally, just because they are asking for $25 doesn't mean the politicians won't just give them $2.50 and tell them to keep quiet. We have a minority government right now so the politicians are far too busy kissing voter but.

Crucial difference

[C10H14N2]

"Making files available on the web is brodcasting"

Americans don't seem to grok that one. "Sharing" to them extends to handing out a copy to every resident of the planet.

Wow

[Greventls]

What happens in 5 years? Is the scale the same so that a 1GB memory card is $5.10? The government isn't going to keep updating the law yearly. Eventually everything will have the maximum tax as memory capacity fully goes into the highest taxed end of the scale.

Absolute garbage

[inphorm]

I buy blank CDRs buy the 1000 at the moment. I have a duplicator for CDs.. but I'm not a pirate. We distribute original recorded material on CDs we burn and print on to ourselves. Yet they want to hit us with piracy taxes because apparently the only use for that many CDRs is for piracy.

I also use them in my photography business quite extensively as well as blank DVDs for giving out to clients, are they going to start hitting me with a fee for that too?

Not all bulk use of blank media is for pirating. And not all ipods are used for pirated music either. I unfortunately own a 30Gb ipod, it's alright to use to listen to music, but the main thing I use it for is to download photos from my digital SLR.. I'd rather carry an ipod with me out in the field than I would a laptop.

And I thought Australian taxes and copyright laws were backwards..

- paul

http://www.paulpichugin.com.au/ [paulpichugin.com.au]

Re:Should I move to Canda?

[bky1701]

What it comes down to is you cannot tax illegal behaviour. Our courts would never accept it.

I don't know about there, but in the US theft, fraud, extortion money, bribes and other illicit gain IS taxed, income taxed. Yes it's strange, but it's how it is. I am willing to bet it's the same in Canada as well.

Re:$40 for a 30 gig ipod?

[guardiangod]

The collective had argued the memory inside a digital audio device such as an iPod is an audio recording medium primarily used to store music, and therefore should be subject to the Canadian Copyright Act.
...It says devices such as the iPod can be classified as a "recording medium" and should be subject to taxation.


Noticed that the collective is arguing that the device is a "recording medium" used to "store music", not "you can listen to it".

In other words, they are putting the tax not because you can listen to it anywhere, but because you can store "their" musics on your "recording medium".

Subtle, but boy does it make a huge difference.

Re:Should I move to Canda?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well the way the levies already work, it would make it absolutely LEGAL to fill that ipod with borrowed music. We already pay levies on cd-r's. Net effect? It is absolutely legal to make copies of copyrighted CDs as long as they are for private use. Just remember to format the ipod before you sell in on ebay for your new fancy iphone!(if we ever get them in canada)

I'd happily pay an extra $75 or so to fill a fair-sized hard drive with music, and have full legal justification. Of course I would continue to buy cds from bands I like, just as I do now, but that is a seperate discussion altogether. Casual listening and one-hit wonders are the true cause of piracy.

Re:Hey Canadians...

[Grey Ninja]

Not because of that. But yes, we are free to download all the music we like in Canada.

Re:Should I move to Canda?

[shark72]

"So it's just like the US (hint: Audio Home Recording Act)."

Nope. These two statements are true:

1. Canadians pay a levy on recordable media.
2. In some circumstances, it's legal for Canadians to share copyrighted music.

However, the following is not true:

Canadians pay a levy on recordable media. Because of this, in some circumstances it's legal for Canadians to share copyrighted music.

To be sure, lots of Canadians use the levy as moral justification to pirate as much music as they can, often citing the fact that artists are compensated by the levy (the reality is that it largely goes to Canadian artists). In other words, Canadians have their choice of 94 moral justifications for piracy, vs. the 93 that we in the United States have.

You're correct that the AHRA defines tariffs on some recordable media (including DAT machines, and those music CD-Rs that nobody buys). I'm sure there are lots of people who use the existence of this tariff as a moral justification for piracy, but the tariff certainly doesn't make it legal.

Re:You've gotta be shitting me

[Joce640k]

You're comparing k-fed to "filet mignion"?

Maybe a better analogy would be going into an "all-u-can-eat" special and pocketing some extra dumplings for the dog.

It's still be a broken analogy though. Downloading is more taking pictures of the food than stuffing it in your pockets and taking it home with you.

But what are they taxing?

[Anonymous McCartneyf]

If I read this correctly, the people wanting these taxes also want to tax memory cards of a sort that work in MP3 players but are more often used in digital cameras. What should the digital photographers do, if this law is passed, when their current stock of memory cards runs out?
And if hard drives get taxed, what will you do when your current HD dies?

Re:It doesn't make sense

[Anonymous McCartneyf]

I believe that the Canadian government does subsidize the creation of Canadian music, on the theory that American culture would swamp Canadian culture (more) thoroughly without the subsidy.

Re:The very least they could do

[itlurksbeneath]

No kidding... The next thing you know, they'll be taxing products like gasoline or tobacco at different (and much higher) rates for no apparent reason. True, true, usually there is some hand-waving about supporting roads and health care costs but I think the accounting out the other end says different. At least in this case, they TELL you the tax rates. Anybody here know the tax rates for gasoline in their city/state? Here, I think it's around 15%, but I can't find info on it anywhere.