Seth Jayson misses the point or, perhaps worse, misses the real
reasons to criticize a
recent Copyright Board of Canada decision. Among other things, Canadian
consumers will pay up to $25 extra for an MP3 player, money which will be
distributed to Canadian songwriters.
Jayson missed the big point in that ruling which was: Downloading tunes on
to your hard drive in Canada is legal. Let me repeat: Downloading is legal.
Why, even the president of the Canadian
Recording Industry Association is in today's Globe and Mail, saying only that downloading is contentious. When you have the recording industry even allowing that there is room for interpretation on issues it has all along seen as black and white, well, then you have something, my friend.
So that whole “downloading is legal” thing was the new new thing out of the Copyright Board ruling but it's old news that making a single copy of your recordings for your personal use is legal
in Canada. You can't say that about the U.S. If you want to make a copy of
the CD you already bought to store at the cottage, that's just fine if you
live in Canada but you'll get sued if you do that too often in the U.S.
One of the reasons such copying is legal in Canada is that we pay a
levy on blank media, now to include some MP3 players. So is an extra $25 —
and that's a one-time only levy when you buy an MP3 player — such a bad
tradeoff for an environment in which buyers of music are given reasonable
limits on the types of private copying they can do? I don't know. But I do
know if I was a columnist for The Motley Fool I might take a look at the
entire decision of the Copyright Board of Canada and not just one small part
of it.
David,
I appreciate your interest in my article, but I think you missed the point when you say I missed the point, or missed the point of the point. (Now I'm dizzy.) I DID, in fact, mention the Canadian board's finding that downloading songs — even songs you haven't paid for — is NOT illegal. In fact, if you'd scrolled all the way to the end of the article instead of rushing off to your blog, you would have seen that I found that decision pretty ironic.
The government gave the green light to an activity that it admits is harmful (by collecting taxes on that same activity in order — allegedly — to compensate those hurt by it). That may be logic to a Canadian bureaucrat, but to any American (and to plenty of Canadians, to judge by my mail bag), it makes no sense at all. You might as well, as I suggested, collect a figure-skating tax to compensate your ice dancers for their victimization by evil French skating judges.
Finally, don’t forget, David, we write for our audiences. In the U.S., the tax itself is the item that will turn most heads. The ironical situation involving the green-light for downloading is simply the icing on the cake. Also, please note that in the short-form articles for Motley Fool takes, we focus pretty tightly on purpose. These are not meant to be long news analyses.
Fool on,
sj