CRIA Admits P2P Downloading Legal in Canada 106
An anonymous reader writes "Michael Geist is reporting that the Canadian Recording Industry Association — the Canadian equivalent of the RIAA — this week filed documents in Canadian court that seeks to kill the expansion of the levy on blank media to iPods since it fears that the system now legalizes peer-to-peer downloading of music in Canada. CRIA's President Graham Henderson argued in his affidavit that a recent decision from the Copyright Board of Canada 'broadens the scope of the private copying exception to avoid making illegal file sharers liable for infringement.'"
Get Your Money's Worth (Score:5, Funny)
Also, if you don't mind, keep seeding when you're done
Re:Get Your Money's Worth (Score:5, Interesting)
Unlike the US version of the levy, I don't need to copy onto levied media. Copying anywhere is fine. The argument for this is that the levy can be expanded (and there's currently a motion to expand it to the iPod, which is what the CRIA is objecting to).
But do note that this applies only to music, not to movies or games. No levies paid to them.
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Well no, I think he got it absolutely correct. The Canadian government assumed everyone, or a large percentage of the po
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I don't know the history, but I think that sounds close enough: they assumed lots of people would be doing it, so they legalized it. The levy was put in place as compensation to the artists.
But the OP wasn't right in saying that we're "all breaking the law anyway". If he'd said lots of p
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No, that's not right at all. Section 80 of the Copyright Act [cb-cda.gc.ca] specifically legalizes copying for private use. Copyright law allows private copying.
The gist was 'we can't possibly sue everyone for copyright infringement, so we'll just levy the means by which to copy, and only pursue those that exceed the levy by a significant amount'
That might h
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But that's not what he said, what he said was:
since your government seems to think it's OK to just assume you're all breaking the law anyway,
which is a substantially different thing. I think most people understand that "all" in the above is not to be taken completely literally.
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Personally I have no sympathy for the RIAA or its Canadian version. I think they are scum and their industry should die a painful death for what they have do
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You don't get levied on non-recordable media. So if you're distributing software on CDROM's, you don't get charged a levy. So you must be talking about very small runs where it's not economical to press a CDROM.
But the levy is only $0.21 per CD-R. Are you in the business of selling small numbers of copies of software at a price where you can't absorb $0.21? I think that's your problem, the levy isn't your problem.
There used to be a legitimate complain
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You've got it wrong: the government thinks that it is *not* illegal to copy music for personal use. The levy gives me the right to make copies of music for my use. Period. Nothing illegal about it.
Which makes this quote:
CRIA's President Graham Henderson argued in his affidavit that a recent decision from the Copyright Board of Canada 'broadens the scope of the private copying exception to avoid making illegal file sharers liable for infringement.'
wrong. They are not "illegal file sharers," they are completely legal file sharers, who are not infringing in any way.
Re:Get Your Money's Worth (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Get Your Money's Worth (Score:5, Insightful)
The law in Canada states that it's OK to copy music for your own personal use. This means that you can borrow a friend's equipment and music to make a copy for yourself, but your friend would not be allowed to make a copy for you (even though the end result is the same, it's the intent that's different.)
How this affects uploading or downloading: when I fire up my bittorrent client and connect, I am initiating a download. In effect, I am the one downloading, using the hardware and software of other people. When someone else connects to my machine, it requires no action from me - they're simply using *my* hardware and software to make the copy.
Think about it: if you go to a website and click a link, *you* are downloading (making a copy), but there is nobody else involved in the transaction - just you and the remote web server. There is nobody clicking something on the web server to enable the transfer. (Note that "who put the file there in the first place" is an entirely *different* question.)
Note that this has already been decided by the court - the difference between uploading and downloading is who initiates the transfer. If you initiate the transfer, then you're either downloading or uploading, but it requires no action from anyone else, there is no uploading happening.
Note that "making available" is a different legal question. There is currently an effort by the CRIA to add "making available" an exclusive right of the copyright holder (which would negate this entire argument.)
Re:Get Your Money's Worth (Score:5, Informative)
So as of the last 3 years, it has been fully legal to make your music available as well as download music. Seems that Canada does support a certain amount of privacy.
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Good link. For those who don't want to wade through the whole thing looking for the juicy bits, here's the tender morsel of goodness:
Mmm mmm good...
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I'm too paranoid about going over my bandwidth limits.
Also, I've bought more CDs in the last year than I have in the preceding decade. By which I mean, I bought a CD this year! (Teddy Bears - Soft Machine)
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What I meant is that it is completely legal now, but that the CRIA is attempting to make it illegal. Whether they'll succeed or not depends on how corruptible our legislators are.
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What I meant is that it is completely legal now, but that the CRIA is attempting to make it illegal. Whether they'll succeed or not depends on how corruptible our legislators are.
A better question to ask is how much influence the CRIA has left, considering they lost the biggest Canadian labels. If I was a polition (and I'm glad I'm not) I'd be more willing to listen to Canadian artists and companies than large international companies, especially with the past few blows the RIAA has taken. I expect we will see a levy on iPods and mp3 players, and I will be happy to have that. I have no problem paying a little extra per disc since the money will be going to the artists, maybe not
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This is why torrent "downloaders" have gotten notices while Kazaa downloaders haven't (only Kazaa uploaders have gotten the notices, I believe).
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Given that I used to maintain my own BT client and eMule mod, I 'kind' of know that.
IMO though, uploading is a protocol requirement for downloading since download speeds usually suck otherwise. Once the download is done though, continued sharing/seeding can directly translate into facilitating copyright infringement and distribution.
From the link in digitrev's post...
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First, it only covers music.
Second, while downloading is generally accepted to be legal (even before this crap), uploading may still fall under distribution, which isn't. We've had a judge question that (with logic along the lines of "there can't be a download without an upload, so if the download is legal..."), but there's been nothing conclusive.
The idea with physical copies, for example, is that it's legal if I lend you a CD, you make a copy for personal use, and I get
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Ask a lawyer. Better yet, ask a judge.
I figure it depends on several things:
(a) is it legal to download in the first place? If not, how'd you get enough to upload pieces?
(b) can someone prove they got the entire file from you (i.e. an RIAA investigator actually doing some investigating using a hacked client which only uses a single source), or can you prove you never distributed the whole file to someone else?
(c) how much
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Think of the profits!
All those poor leeches^FCRIA executives NEED their $250K/yr salaries, 5 martini lunches, & $10k/nite hookers!
Oh, the huge manatee! Won't somebody PLEASE think of the PROFITS?????????????
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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You are no longer a Pirate (Score:4, Funny)
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Schizoid if I ever heard it! (Score:2)
(and as a note: I don't download copyrighted material at all -- for the most part, it isn't worth it. I am just getting fed up with their have-their-cake-and-eat-it-too philosophy)
Surprised? (Score:2)
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Given up reading slashdot have you?
"All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster."
Check the bottom of the pages....
I know what you are getting at, but if you use the net, with the laws as they currently stand, it is practically impossible to not download (in so
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More of a 'have their cake, eat it too and make YOU pay for it' philosophy.
And no, you don't get cake.
Does Size Matter? (Score:2)
- Cassette Tape - copies 1 album
- Compact Disc - copies ~12 albums (mp3)
- Apple iPod - copies ~10,000 songs
At 99 per song, I'm sure the average college student with an iPod, has spent $10,000 on iTunes, but perhaps the CRIA feels differently.No, it's just panic (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, it's a really silly idea that the incumbent group gets a government/taxpayer subsidy to make sure they stay in business, particularly when that group is nothing more than a middleman between the customer and supplier (musician). It's bad from the standpoint that it doesn't encourage efficiency in that middle layer and that stems from the fact that there is no competition.
But that aside, the government and middlemen decided they should get a subsidy in the form of a tax on blank records. That way everybody says "We all know what blanks are for, and that's to copy music, so we'll tax you and we don't have to sue people, etc etc". So everybody is happy. Music can be copied around, and while it's not perfect, it keeps the money going to enough place that the middlemen are happy because they get billions for doing nothing, and people are somewhat happy because everybody acknowledges that for the tax they get to copy music around.
Except the fly in the ointment is that less and less people actually burn to a CD. CD's are clumsy because of their limited capacity, and so people want to take 100, 1,000, and 10,000 songs with them. And it all goes onto a media where there's no tax. Worse, people are trading songs from all over the world via P2P there's no control over how quickly music gets copie,.. so the government in it's limited imagination says "no problem, we'll slap a tax on iPods and all is good". Except that it means the iPod levy, besides bringing less money proportionally to the record companies, also fully legitimizes P2P in Canada. To which the taxpayer says "Of course it does. You get your money, so you have to acknowledge that this is fine. At long last, the record companies (a.k.a. "the Middlemen") finally see the trap of their own doing. In accepting the fee all along they've legitimized the concept that non-profit copying is okay.
And since they've accepted the premise of "copying okay as long as we get money", they have no philosophical argument that P2P is wrong or hurts artists. And now the only thing we're arguing about is the price. From their standpoint, they feel they're owed $10,000 per iPod, except they know they would never get that. At most a few hundred. But even then, people would just come south and buy in the U.S.
So they've lost the argument in Canada. The only thing left is for them to crawl back into their hole and figure out how to make the musicians pay for all of this.
I find the way the Internet is slowly cutting up the record companies fascinating, and it will be interesting to see how they either adapt or die in the next decade. My bet is on "dying", but we'll see.
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Never heard of 'Hollywood accounting'? It's a system where you sign a contract that nobody can figure out whereby your profits go to cover the record company's losses. They use that in films & TV as well; Babylon 5 is one of the most profitable TV shows ever made, but they're still screwin JMS on the back end.
And the companies are very creative when it comes to finding 'losses'
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Music creation costs nothing compared to high budget movies. I don't want those movies to go away so I dunno what to do to clean up the movie industry's mobsters. But the recording industry needs to die. Its time. Music can be created cheap and bands can deal with online distro themselves. The only people that can really do the work that the bands cant do is setup huge shows. And shows should be the way a middle man makes money. This way there is more shows to go to! yey!
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Re:Does Size Matter? (Score:5, Informative)
You have to remember that there are multiple players here, and they don't all want the same thing. The CRIA represents multinational labels, and they now hate the levy because they hardly represent any Canadian artists, so they don't get much of the payout.
Then there's the CPCC and the other collectives, who actually collect the levy. They'd love to expand it to cover everything.
And there's the Copyright Board, the government body who gets to hold hearings and make decisions. They're actually pretty good at finding a balance. The rule they seem to follow is that if a medium is mainly used to hold recorded music, then it gets the levy, with the amount depending on exactly how often it's used for music, and how big it is. So generic hard drives are probably safe, but the ones in MP3 players probably aren't. (They were nearly taxed once before, but escaped on a technicality. If the levy survives the multinational lobby, I would guess they'll get hit.)
If your phone's memory is mainly used (i.e. by most people, not just mainly used by you) for downloaded recorded music, it might end up being levied.
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Gotta love bus
Poetic Justice (Score:4, Insightful)
Paying for Media (Score:5, Interesting)
Here in the U.S., we pay a 2 percent royalty [house.gov] on all medium capable of storing and playing back music.And we've been paying it since 1992, when the "Digital Audio Recording Technology Act" was passed.
However, our Congress hasn't set up a legal link between the paying of that tax and our legal rights to use the devices in any ways that exceed thing on which we don't pay a tax.
It seems that in Canada you have that right attached to a tax. Hm - being taxed for something and gaining a benefit. How novel!
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- RG>
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That's because they originally asked for the tax when you could only fit 10 - 15 songs on a cd, cd burners cost $700, and blank media were $35 a piece.
Now you can fit hundreds of mp3s on a cd, cd burners cost less than $20, and blank media are ... gee, at less than half a buck a piece, they're mostly tax nowadays ... dvd blanks, at 20 cents a piece, are now half the price of cd blanks.
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AFAIK though it has not extended to flash memory and hard drives in the US, nor to any blank DVD media.
Imagine a JBOD-Jukebox of Music CD-Rs formatted for data sharing music. Now imagine the cost for multiple CD drives and latency for a changer instead. They have a vested interest in not letting tariffed media get
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Personally, I'd love to see you do it again with the recording industry. You cannot imagine the warm fuzzy feeling I get imagining crates and crates of the latest Britney Spears album sinking to the bottom of the harbour.
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Don't worry. Britney's 'performance' at the VMA's last week will help insure that you get your wish. She finally proved to everyone that her (lack of) talent is the best tool available to accomplish your dreams.
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I mean, Throwing the latest Britney Spears album into the river is as useful as throwing the latest Micheal Jackson album into the river. You're actually doing the record companies a favour, because at least they can claim insurance on the materials!
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No.
You're thinking of the Audio Home Recording Act. It actually only applies to certain media and devices, not all of them capable of storing or playing music. For example computers, computer hard drives, data CDRs, most portable music players, etc. don't fall under the AHRA. Also you're wrong as to what the ro
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I guess I'm not too surprised. Emperor Palpatine summed it up nicely: "You will pay the price for your lack of vision."
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On the other hand, a lot of the commentary I hear from RIAA and music studio execs (always to be taken with a grain of salt, to be sure) revolves around the fact that portable storage is now comparatively huge. You can walk around with a black (or maybe Apple beige) box in your pocket with fi
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Nobody with that much music on their player has actually spent fifteen or twenty thousand dollars though, so I have to agree with what one executive said, "Everyone knows those things are full of pirated music" (or words to that effect.) Oh sure, that's maybe not the legal definition of "piracy" but the point is well taken.
There's another tact: what do you define as music? I don't mean as a matter of taste, but rather that there are other types of audio that can be encoded as MP3 or AAC files which provide more content per dollar. Podcasts can extend for an hour or more, be completely free, and have new content available daily, and there are many of them with overlapping interests. Then there's the ability to store non-playable content like essential application suites and password vaults.
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Who is stealing from who? Are people downloading music stealing from the artists (many who are buying their merchandise and attending their concerts), or is the recording industry stealing from unsigned artists?
Why should I, as an unsigned artist, be paying money for every blank CD I use to record my music?
-Myke
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American suckers. Paying taxes and not [wikipedia.org] getting [wikipedia.org] anything [wikipedia.org] worthwhile [wikipedia.org]. Hm.
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I hope they expand the levy to DVDs and more... (Score:2)
At the time the levy was imposed DVDs were not available as a storage medium for the mainstream. Now that it is tim
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canada as the new mp3.com? (Score:2)
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So basically downloading is legal, uploading is illegal.
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Re:Reminds me of the ol' Microsoft vs. Sun discuss (Score:3, Insightful)
And there are about a million devices worldwide that use java - from cell phones to computers to whatever
And no, mono doesn't count. It sucks (but then again, so does C3).
So, to put it back into the context - the CRIA wanted a guaranteed revenue stream by taxing blank CDs ... it no longer works in their favour, so they want to change the rules of the game. Sounds a LOT like Microsoft. The only thing left is for them to start throwing chairs, and secretly f
You forgot and important part in your analogy (Score:1)
Headline is a little misleading. (Score:1, Informative)
I'm pretty confident that if the Copyright board ruled that P2P downloading was legal that the act would be amended in short order
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I believe the word you're looking for here is Usenet.
The CRIA is not Canadian (Score:2, Informative)
The association representing Canadian artists is the Canadian Music Creators Coalition [musiccreators.ca].
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Also, the CRIA was formed in 1963 [thecanadia...opedia.com] as the Canadian Record Manufacturer's Association, and aren't a 'wing' of the RIAA. They are the RIAA's counterpart in Canada.
Why hello Mr. Astroturf (Score:2)
The CRIA represents no Canadian artists, rather the American corporations who make up the RIAA. They use the "CRIA" name simply to suggest they have a Canadian connection; they don't.
Higher in Canada (Score:2)
In soviet Russia... (Score:1)
Re:You're still stealing from people (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:You're still stealing from people (Score:5, Insightful)
Who is stealing from whom again?
The private copying levy [wikipedia.org] exists on the premise that people are paying to allow for certain types of private copying. The law excludes some activities (e.g., if you copied music from any source and then started selling it -- illegal), and allows others (e.g., if you borrowed a music CD from a friend and copied it for your own personal use -- legal). It still makes distribution of music illegal, and, yes, as far as I know, it doesn't cover software or DVDs.
It's my personal decision that even though it is legal in Canada to do some types of copying thanks to the private copying law and the CD levy, I still buy my music. Why? Because I think the levy deal sucks for the artists. They get hardly anything (even less than normal), and the agency involved in distributing the money can't properly account for what people actually buy (i.e. the popular artists are the only ones likely to see much).
But would I be on a firm legal grounds if I did decide to exercise the rights granted under the private copying law? Absolutely yes. I'm paying for it. So, shut up. It's the record companies that are being inconsistent here by lobbying for the levy in the first place, but still claiming that people making any kind of copy are "stealing" music. No, in many circumstances it is already paid for. In Canada, if Billy loans Jane a CD to copy it is NOT stealing, it is entirely legal.
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Copyright owners are always stealing from the public by extending copyright beyond what it was intended for and putting DRM on media that does not expire when copyright right runs out.
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No.
Nothing is being 'STOLEN' from you. Simply don't buy music from companies that use DRM or companies that back the extension of copyright.
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Supporting the bands you like is great, but I'm sure most of them would agree that they actually receive more money from ticket sales than CDs.
Yup, but. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yup, but. (Score:5, Informative)
http://web.archive.org/web/20040407114727/http://www.mytelus.com/news/article.do?pageID=canada_home&articleID=1563030 [archive.org]
Quote: "Justice Konrad von Finckenstein ruled Wednesday that the Canadian Recording Industry Association did not prove there was copyright infringement by 29 so-called music uploaders. He said that downloading a song or making files available in shared directories, like those on Kazaa, does not constitute copyright infringement under the current Canadian law."
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Thanks for the clarification.
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