Canadian Songwriters' Collective Licensing Bid Goes Voluntary 93
Last year, the Songwriters Association of Canada (SAC) proposed a plan to legalize the file sharing of copyrighted songs, which involved a small monthly fee to people using an internet connection. Critics of the plan complained that it amounted to another tax, and the Canadian recording industry said it violated copyright law. Now, as an anonymous reader writes,
"The SAC has renewed its bid to legalize peer-to-peer file sharing in return for a levy on Internet service. The SAC is now calling for the plan to be voluntary, with both consumers and creators having the right to opt-out. ACTRA, the leading performer group in Canada, now says it is also supportive of a legalized approach with the prospect of extending the plan to video sharing."
Re:Already legal (Score:1, Informative)
Downloading for personnal use, yes. Uploading, no.
Re:Other taxes? (Score:5, Informative)
We've had a media "levy" (don't call it a tax!) for the last twelve years. The irony is that my brother (a full-time professional musician) has to pay this levy on blank media he uses for his own music, and the money goes back to the record companies or music publishers. If any artists get his money, it's the Celine Dions of the country. (Although I seem to recall that she came out firmly against the levy, pointing out that even she's made less from it than she's paid into it by buying CD blanks for her computer).
Re:Already legal (Score:2, Informative)
Now, right before the last election was called, a bill was brought to the table (Bill C-61) which would make downloading copyright material illegal, even for personal use, however, when an election gets called, all bills on a table get swept aside and have to be reintroduced after the election is done. We havn't seen it rear its ugly head yet, but it is most likely still floating around, waiting for its chance to get introduced again.
Re:Other taxes? (Score:5, Informative)
As a professional your brother should be claiming CD-R's as a business expense anyway. I'm a sound tech who goes through 2-3 100 CD-R spindles monthly, entirely on content I record legitimately myself, much of it live demo recordings. I write it all off, so they can levy it all they want as far as I'm concerned. I also write off half my "entertainment" expenditures from every outing where I discus music with anyone, so roughly 45% of my restaurant/bar bills. It's quite an easy subject to bring up!
I also question whether the tax is actually collected on all imported media, since I pay 23 cents per CD-R at a local shop [canadacomputers.com], and the tax is supposed to be 21 cents each, soon to be raised to 29 cents [cdrlabs.com] if it hasn't already. I have trouble believing the manufacturing, distributing, and retailing revenues total a mere 2 cents a disc.
As an artist who knows I'll never see dime of any such levy, it's pretty irritating. How the music industry is supposed to benefit by making internet traffic more expensive is beyond me. This is typical of the music industry's back-end approach to combating music piracy rather than the value-added approach which is generally the most successful.
Worse yet is the "SOCAN tax" for live performances. 3% of the pay for an artist or band is collected by SOCAN [socan.ca] (Tariff 3A) to be redistributed to SOCAN members. If an artist or band plays all original music, they have to submit a setlist and wait to get that money back. If they play no original or SOCAN member compositions (i.e. all American-written songs) the collected money is basically swallowed by SOCAN. So the organization whose mission is to compensate Canadian songwriters for 3rd party performance and broadcast actually taxes Canadian performers unfairly and profits from the performance of non-Canadian compositions.
Fortunately, virtually no small live music venues across the country cooperate until they are compelled by SOCAN, and of the 200+ small venues I've played I've only encountered two such venues, one has since closed. So just avoid the Boar's Head Pub in Stratford Ontario and you're ok...