Want to share music? Move to Canada!

[SurfD]

Thats right, forget the USA, Canada is the land of the free (lawsuit free music sharing that is)

According to this article on Netscape.ca a canadian judge has tossed out the CRIA lawsuits and said that "sharing music on services such as Kazaa is NOT against current Canadian Copyright laws".

Score one for the great white north :P

[Alluvian]

Wow.  Having it as a fringe thing is one thing, but publically making it legal?  I wonder what the rammifications of this are going to be?

I know a lot of people who didn't use napster simply because they thought it was illegal and morally wrong.  What would happen with a court blessing like this?

It will be interesting, but probably instantly appealed as well.

[Reg]

We pay a special tax on recordable media that goes to music and video copyright holders. Apparently the judge decided that because of that they were being paid whenever someone burned themselves a CD full of tunes.

There will be endless appeals of course. :)

[Alluvian]

We pay a special tax on recordable media that goes to music and video copyright holders.

Poor software industry gets no kickback on this?  I imagine a lot of those cds are having softward cd images burned to them.

[Teleku]

Jesus Christ, is there anything you guys don't have a special tax for?

[Speedy Cerviche]

Having some extra costs slapped onto blank CDs and MP3 players is preferrable to the RIAA subverting the justice system for their own ends and then lynching penniless college kids.

[daveNYC]

Jesus Christ, is there anything you guys don't have a special tax for?

Shit, I'd be willing to pay a tax on media in order to get free muzak.  Works for me.

[Teleku]

I was just joking in reference to fact they had yet another wierd as tax on something.  What was the original purpose of the tax?  That article never mentioned it, and the Judges said this was the reasoning for the decision:

"No evidence was presented that the alleged infringers either distributed or authorized the reproduction of sound recordings," he wrote in his 28-page ruling. "They merely placed personal copies into their shared directories which were accessible by other computer users via a P2P service."

He compared the action to a photocopy machine in a library. "I cannot see a real difference between a library that places a photocopy machine in a room full of copyrighted material and a computer user that places a personal copy on a shared directory linked to a P2P service," he said.

Didn't see any mention of that tax in the article anywhere, and what ever reasoning for putting the tax down before, it obviously wasn't so you could download music free.  So as far as I can tell, it is just another fruity ass random tax in Canada.  Or Reg was just making it up, one or the other.

[daveNYC]

I know some (all?) of Europe has something like that.  Think the tax even covers HDDs.  'Course that has nada to do with Canada.

[Tebonas]

Yep, we had that tax since the time of audio and video tapes. Not that it does help us much now, music sharing being illegal here as well and private copies of your music being outlawed all of a sudden.

[Alluvian]

I find it hard to believe that the prosecuters could find no evidence of anyone actually downloading any of these songs.  Which if you stick with the library analogy it would be like the librarian sleeping in plain view of a kid going through one by one and photocopying every single page of a book.

Nobody in the suit had a single song on their hard drives that was not backed up with a legit purchased cassette or cd?  I don't believe it for a second.

[HaemishM]

Having some extra costs slapped onto blank CDs and MP3 players is preferrable to the RIAA subverting the justice system for their own ends and then lynching penniless college kids.

A-motherfucking-men.

[Reg]

Didn't see any mention of that tax in the article anywhere, and what ever reasoning for putting the tax down before, it obviously wasn't so you could download music free.  So as far as I can tell, it is just another fruity ass random tax in Canada.  Or Reg was just making it up, one or the other.

I certainly wasn't making it up. I got my information from http://globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040401.wxmathfront0401/BNStory/Front/

Where he says...

No one gets charged under the Criminal Code for downloading, however — they get charged under the Copyright Act in Canada (and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the U.S.). And Judge von Finckenstein of the Federal Court certainly doesn't seem to equate downloading or sharing with theft. In fact, his ruling held that under Canadian copyright law both downloading and sharing are legal. This is primarily because of the copyright levy that Canadians pay on blank CDs and MP3-playing devices, funds which are then distributed to artists (theoretically).

The judge's decision was based on a decision made by the Copyright Board of Canada last year. On page 19 of the document linked below it explains that private copying is legal because copyright holders can be compensated from the funds generated by the levy. It's a .pdf file so I can't just cut and paste in the relevant section.

http://www.cb-cda.gc.ca/decisions/c12122003-b.pdf

[squirrel]

Jesus Christ, is there anything you guys don't have a special tax for?

No. Fucking was free once a long time ago...but that got appealed.

And the tax exists - pay it every time you buy recordable media. IIRC it is actually to renumerate industries that suffer from lost revenue due to said recordings. My memory on that could be foggy though, but i thought both music and software industry bodies got a kickback. Can't recall and too lazy to google it up.

[Teleku]

Ah, I see.  Thanks for the info.