March 6th, 2006

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Music
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Come to Canada, Steal Music

Tod writes about a recent Canadian Recording Industry Association report, which characterizes Canada as soft on music piracy:

Music sales in Canada dropped 4% in 2005 to $536 million, the Canadian Recording Industry Assn. reported Thursday. The dip is part of a 10-year decline that the CRIA blames on–wait for it!–illegal music downloading.

Canada hasn’t updated copyright legislation to cover digital music. Consequently, it has the highest online piracy rate per capita in the world, according to the Intl. Federation of the Phonographic Industry; the CRIA says 1.6 billion music files are swapped annually.

Oddly, the CRIA doesn’t mention the recordable media levy, which Canadians have been paying for the past 5 years.

Comments: 5 Responses so far

gillian
March 6th, 2006
9:48 am

Two years ago, I did a report for my “Computers and Society” class on Canadian copyright laws (specifically regarding music copying). The rules about what you could and couldn’t do were rather strange; for example, regulations said you could copy your own music for your own use, but couldn’t copy your music and give the copy to a friend, because you’re “publishing” the music in that case. However, there’s nothing wrong with you lending a CD to your friends, and them making their own copies for themselves. Note that this was partially my interpretation and now out of date.

After following that Wikipedia link, I’m surprised to hear that there’s no blank media levy on iPods, yet it still exists for blank CDs. I use CDs to backup personal files, while my iPod is filled with music I never paid for (directly)…

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Ianiv
March 6th, 2006
10:17 am

More about this from Michael Geist:
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1142

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Anne
March 6th, 2006
10:40 am

I read this latest bit of propaganda from CRIA and laughed:

“We demand that 150,000 of your beer swillin’, doughnut eating, beaver luvin’ citizens buy a copy of Hallo Back Girl or or … we’ll throw a hissy fit!”

“I’m surprised to hear that there’s no blank media levy on iPods”

We used to have one. Then the Canadian Coalition for Fair Digital Access (Walmart, Apple, Dell and others) fought to have the levy on mp3 players abolished, the Supreme Court agreed and the levy was removed.

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Mack D. Male
March 6th, 2006
2:05 pm

You know the funny thing about piracy of music in Canada, is that it’s all American music that we pirate! Try to find Massari or Carl Henry, or even some of the other lesser known Canadian artists that you’ll hear on a Top 40 radio station, on a file sharing service or on BitTorrent, and you’ll come up empty handed.

I think this is because music finds its way online through the US first, and Canadians just download it. Of course, maybe it’s just that we dont like our own artists enough to post their music online.

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Nanuk
March 6th, 2006
3:18 pm

Why blame the downloader if the music industry doesn’t make the songs available for commercial download?

I always check iTunes first, but if what I want isn’t available (I’d say over 80% isn’t), I’ll go to P2P.

First rule of marketing is to put your inventory on the shelf so people can buy it. The music industry, both here in Canada and abroad, are out of touch with their consumers.

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