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America has no exclusive patent on officials like Sen. Fritz Hollings sucking up to the entertainment industry and screwing consumers in the process. On March 9, Canada’s Copyright Board Commission announced that a new Canadian “levy” will be introduced effective January 1, 2003 on all blank audio recording media. Sample rates for this stickup (all cash figures cited in this article are in Canadian dollars): The money collected will be distributed by the Canadian Private Copying Collective to that beleaguered and disadvantaged constituency: those who own the rights to sound recordings of musical works (composers, authors, performers and producers) The levy is payable on all media that qualify, without regard to end use. The Copyright Act exempts from the levy recording media that are sold to a society, association or corporation that represents persons with perceptual disabilities. Under certain terms and conditions, CPCC may also waive the levy on sales to certain persons or organizations. These include religious organizations, broadcasters, law enforcement agencies, courts, tribunals, court reporters, provincial ministers of education and members of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, music and advertising industries. This waiver applies only to audiocassettes, CD-R Audio, CD-RW Audio and MiniDiscs. The CPCC is accepting representations of objection to the new levy rates up until no later than May 8, 2002. Details for the required protocols for filing objections may be found here: However, as far as the Copyright Board is concerned, this whole levy ripoff is a done deal, and they caution that: “No purpose is served by asking the Board to reject the tariff as a whole. No purpose is served by asking that the tariff include a mechanism that would allow those who can prove that they use qualifying media for purposes other than reproducing musical works to be exempted from payment or to receive a refund.” Does the tone of that statement infuriate you as much as it does me? Clearly, there is little point to jumping through the Copyright Board’s objection filing hoops. This issue needs to be addressed at the political, not the bureaucratic level. The Canadian federal governemnt minister responsible for this egregious foolishness is The Minister of Canadian Heritage, The Hon. Sheila Copps whose Web page you will find here: You can contact Ms. Copps here: Or from the link on her Web page. Please do. Canada, of course, is the home of tax fascism, and making matters worse in this instance is the current government’s paranoid obsession with protecting and subsidizing “Canadian content” regardless of its quality or ability to compete in the open market. There are plenty of Canadian artists who are more than able to do so -- think of Neil Young; Celene Dion; Alanis Morissette; Bryan Adams, etc., etc. Do you think folks like that need a subsidy from consumers over and above the handsome royalties they receive through business channels? I don’t. The Independent Canadian Recording Media Coalition (ICRMC) has noted that the record industry grosses more than Can$1,000,000,000 a year from recording sales in Canada, a figure that does not include other royalty sources, fees for live performances, fees for broadcast and cable transmission, all of which are worth additional hundreds of $millions. “The way the record industry works,” says the ICRMC, “only the superstar artists will ever likely see a penny of this tax (oops, levy!).” The ICRMC further points out that this tax/levy will actually hurt rather than help young startup bands, music students, and working professional musicians who consume large amounts of blank recording media, and who will see their costs for these products increase, without compensation from the revenues raised. The ICRMC argues that: The Canadian government insists that the new charge is a “levy,” and not a tax, because it is not collected by any level of government, which sounds like weasel-words. When the government takes your money by force of law, in most people’s books that’s a tax, whatever euphemism the lawmakers choose to tack on it. And what really rankles is the abject abandonment of the principle of “innocent until proven guilty,” by presupposing that everyone who purchases blank recording media is a thief. This constitutes a fascinating new innovation in jurisprudence; levy the fine presumptively before the crime. In fact, making copies of copyrighted material for private use is legal under Canada’s copyright legislation, so the new tax/levy is a penalty placed on legal activity in many cases of copying. Who is this law meant to serve? One suspects that few private individuals ever felt any more inhibited by copyright law from, say, taping copies of their LP records onto cassettes, than they would from photocopying pages from a book or magazine -- and virtually EVERYBODY I know does that without the slightest ethical pang. No, as the Copyright Board concedes, while copying any sound recording for almost any purpose infringed copyright prior to the private copy legislation, in practice, the prohibition in terms of private-use copying was for all intents and purposes unenforceable due to today’s copying technologies. Recognizing this, the recording industry convinced the government to set up a straw man in the form of making legal the private copying many people were doing anyway, and then demanding payback in the form of the recordable media levy/tax. The ICRMC also warns that the tax/levy sets a very dangerous precedent, making it not at all fanciful to suggest that similar remedies might be imposed to cover things like, say, a “levy” on copy paper to subsidize publishers whose copyrighted material is pirated in photocopiers. Another aspect of this farrago is that it may have consequences that its authors never envisioned. When told about the levy/tax, a young acquaintance of mine commented: “I guess this means that it’s now OK to pirate all we want.” Certainly, one can imagine that being shafter for these astronomical levys on recordable media will harden the resolve of some to “get their money’s worth.” The levys, particularly on hardware like MP3 players, will almost certainly encourage a land-office business in cross-border shopping for these items. Because the tax -- levy -- is applied at the manufacturer/commercial importer level, recording media purchased outside Canada for personal use is exempt. Only the sale of recordable media by importers or manufacturers triggers the levy/tax. The real problem here is that copyright legislation drafted back in the horse & buggy days of the movable type printing press and wax recordings are woefully inadequate for the digital era, and some of the band-aid workarounds being proposed and imposed in hope of patching this leaky basket are utterly unsatisfactory and unacceptable solutions to deal with the paradigm shift. What we really need is a democratic revisitation of copyright rules and philosophy, not a governmental kowtowing to the content producing industry whiners and lobbyists. You can contact the Canadian Copyright Board here: Claude Majeau http://www.cb-cda.gc.ca/ For more discussion of this issue, check out this Slashdot article.
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