Canadian Songwriters Propose Collective Licensing

aboivin writes "The Songwriters association of Canada has put forward a proposition for collective licensing of music for personal use. The Right to Equitable Remuneration for Music File Sharing would legalize sharing of a copy of a copyrighted musical work without motive of financial gain, for a monthly fee of $5.00 applied to all Canadian internet connections, which would be distributed to creators and rights holders. From the proposal: 'File sharing is both a revolution in music distribution and a very positive phenomenon. The volunteer efforts of millions of music fans creates a much greater choice of repertoire for consumers while allowing songs — both new and old, well known and obscure — to be heard. All that's needed to fulfill this revolution in distribution is a way for Creators and rights holders to be paid.'"

Great, another tax

My first thought: This is like taxing the postal service to deliver copied works. How is that supposed to work?

And they *say* they'll distribute the funds, but that hasn't seemed to work in the past. Why is this going to work now? Someone needs to realize this can't work in practice.

Re:Great, another tax

This is why I love being Canadian. The solution to a big huge problem is usually nothing more than a smaller tiny problem. Canadians have no problems paying taxes -- we're realyl good at it too. A $5 monthly tax not only results in virtually unlimited music downloads, but it also saves on court costs, law enforcement costs, and regulation costs associated with making something illegal even though the majority of the population desires it.

Now that's democracy. If the majority wants free music sharing, then it gets to happen.

So in fact, the $5 is a savings when it comes to all Canadian taxes. That's what I mean by a small problem -- $5 for music -- solving a large problem -- many hundreds of dollars for law regulation, enforcement, and court fees; not to mention the resources of those court personnel and the delays towards court cases that actually matter -- not that we have many murders in this country.

A $60 annual tax is really nothing to complain about. And hey, being a part of the internet service, it gets written off as a business expense!

Re:Great, another tax

So first we pay the songwriters $5/mo
Then we pay the movie writers $10/mo
Then we pay the book industry $10/mo
Then we pay the software industry $10/mo
Then adobe and microsoft step up and say they are so big and widley pirated they should each get their own special levies...$20/mo
Then we pay Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft [again] $10/mo for piracy of their console games
Then the songwriters notice they are only getting $5/mo and demand a raise to $10/mo like everyone else
Then bloggers find out when people read their blogs they are actually downloading a copy and demand their cut... $10/mo
Then photographers demand their fee for all the images that get downloaded .. $10/mo
Then supermodels and celebrities discover that people are trading naked pictures of them without a model release and demand their fee, separate from the photographers... $10/mo
Then myspace users who are having their 'private pictures' redistributed...

"A $60 annual tax is really nothing to complain about."

How about $1200+ ??

Re:Great, another tax

First they passed a tax to pay the songwriters. I said nothing, because I don't listen to music.
Then they passed a tax to pay the movie writers. Again I said nothing, because I don't go to the movies.
Then they passed a tax to pay the book industry. I said nothing, because I don't read.
Then they passed a tax to pay the software industry. I said nothing, because I don't own a computer.
Then they passed a tax to pay me ... but there was nobody left with any money. :-(

Re:Great, another tax

The suddenoutbreakofcommonsense might work in Canada, but in the U.S., it's a very different story.

In my eyes it is anything but common sense but is merely the rule of man, substituted for the rule of law.

Why should the innocent be forced to pay for the illegal acts of others? Many of these people broke no law, yet they are being penalized for others' lawlessness. The guilty and the innocent are both treated equally. By any reasonable definition, this is surely injustice.

One of the reasons people moved to the New World was to establish a system of laws where every person was responsible for their actions, but not that of his brother or sister (e.g. debtor prisons). How then can you justly explain to your neighbor that he must pay for your illegal acts, without calling it legalized theft?

Surely $5 sounds like a trivial matter, hardly worth even debating, but what happens to the cries of all the others who claim they are wronged by thievery of all kinds on the Internet? Can you say yes to the music industry but no to movie studios, books, newspapers, TV, and the host of others sure to claim their victim status? Will you pay all of these groups, and ask your neighbor on dial-up to help? This is justice perverted and the police powers of the state made corrupt.

Is the rule of law not debased when it allows and even requires injustice to be institutionalized?

I guess we all get the kind government we deserve.

If this is the case, then I hope we are never worthy of such institutions.

Who Gets Left Out?

Problem #1: There is always someone judging which band/group/artists get into the system, and who gets left out.

Problem #2: Whoever collects the money has an automatic monopoly. No competition means the monopoly can take a bigger cut of the profits.

Problem #3: This creates a problem for new or up-and-coming groups. They often get their exposure by offering their music, or samples of it, for free. Fewer people will hear them when the cost is the same as more established groups.

A time honored tradition...

Rent Seeking! Everybody else does it!

Too much money, not enough transparency.

The general idea is great, but implementation details matter. I doubt the average Canadian house spends $60/year on music, so the $5/month is excessive. The other thing that caught my eye was this:

Virtually all sharing on the internet and wireless devices would be tracked. Companies who currently do this type of tracking have prepared themselves and are waiting in the wings. Creators and rights holders will be paid with a level of speed and accuracy never before possible.

Who are these mysterious people waiting in the wings that have been spying on everyone? Media Sentry? The same clowns who would tell you that 98% of all online music is "theft"? Most artists should say, loud and clear, "no thanks" unless they can trust the monitoring company to honestly report listening. The industry has that has so long given artists the shaft should be discarded. Everyone else should say, "no thanks" to having all of their internet traffic monitored.

The obvious choice between earning a living by song and dance and personal entertainment or liberty is liberty. Today they want to listen, tomorrow they will censor. The trade off is not worth while.

Yes, I'd like that too...

I'd like $5/month from every internet connection in Canada too. Also I'd like a Ferrari and a Lear Jet.

It's hard to see this as anything but a blatant money-grab. Lots of us use Internet connections for reasons completely unrelated to music; why should we be forced to pay for that? What next, another $5 for the Canadian version of the MPAA, plus $2 for TV shows? Then $5 for the BSA? Another $5 for copyrighted books, and another $5 for comic books?

Why should Grandma pay?

Say Grandma has an internet connection, and uses it only for sending email. She lives on a fixed income. Why should she pay $5 a month to subsidize other people so they can get free music by violating copyright? For someone on a fixed income, another $5/mo bill is a significant hit. Maybe that's $5 she could have spent having lunch with her bridge club at IHOP.

Basically the problem is that copyright is unenforceable, and a majority of the population feels no moral compunctions about violating it. (I happen to disagree with the majority, but that battle is lost, and it's time to move on.) How exactly does it follow from these circumstances that every single member of the population should be forced to pay a subsidy?

Realistically, the music industry is going to have to shrink. Boo hoo. There's no law of nature that dictates that x% of GDP should be spent on recorded music. A hundred years ago, nobody had recorded music, and the only way you got to hear any was either (a) by making music yourself, or (b) going out to hear a band. Then there was a long period where the default way to get music was to listen to commercially produced recordings, you didn't get much choice because the distribution channels (radio and LPs) couldn't cater to the long tails, and the record companies made out like robber barons. Now we're entering a new period, where the record companies have no legitimate function, and the distribution channels can cater to the long tails. It's just a change that's dictated by technology. The good news is that even if the industry shrinks, cutting out the middleman could actually increase remuneration to artists. We don't need a tax to make that happen.

Why only music?

Why only music? Let's add movies for another $5, because they copy them as well on the internet. $10 more for TV shows (hey, pay-per-view is expensive). I heard they pirate Operating Systems, so let's add another $15 for free Windows and MacOS sharing. And they even pirate expensive CAD applications, let's add $25 for them... Soon no one will be able to afford the internet anymore, only because every creator of intellectual property wants to be subsidized instead of competing in the market.

As a copyright holder to be, I'm all for it

So how is it they're going to figure out how much money to distribute to each copyright holder? I guess you could try some massive AI that sniffs all internet traffic, identifies copyrighted content, and tracks who's stuff is shared the most, but that would probably cost about $4.99/internet connection. Maybe they're just going to give all copyright holders the same amount. In that case, I think my parents have a wonderful recording of me singing when I was 5, which I should clearly be the copyright holder on. I can have it posted on my website (hosted in the US but accessible in Canada) in a minute or two. How do I tell the Canadian government where to send my check?

SOCAN Sucks.

I'm Canadian, a musician, a member of SOCAN, and a computer geek. SOCAN sends me a check every 3 months.

Why the fuck should I have my internet bill go up $5 a month!? I'm not downloading that much, my parents aren't either. Very few people are, why should the rest of us pay? Anyway, 90% of the music I download is not covered by SOCAN in the first place, how do those artists get their money?

This is a stupid idea. Music is now, for all intents and purposes, free. I'm cool with that, and I've made a living of music for years. WHAT THE FUCK DID SOCAN EVER DO FOR ME BUT PAY FOR LOBBYISTS?

reality

hey music industry: you're done, you're history, you're bankrupt. buh bye

hey artists: you'll get paid for concerts and advertising, nothing else. get used to it

that's the reality we are becoming

don't like it? who cares. that's what is happening anyway. go ahead and make a bunch of laws counteracting this trend. i hereby pass a law saying the sun will move in the opposite direction. same impact on reality

end of story

Somewhat old news

This was reported on December 3rd by Dr. Michael Geist on his blog here [michaelgeist.ca]. If you're interested in copyright issues in Canada check out his site; he's very informed and an interesting source of information.

While the SAC could have taken a stronger stand against DRM, this proposal should (though likely won't) cause the government to rethink its decision to import the DMCA into Canada. Even if you disagree with portions of this proposal, it is great to see Canadian songwriters, musicians, and music labels now singing the same song, promoting ways to make money from P2P rather than engage in failed attempt to stop it.
- Michael Geist

Greedy pigs want to set an ugly precedent

I'm 56, and I average under 5 gigabytes a month on my ADSL account. I subscribe to a legal internet radio service, which compensates artists, and actually plays real music. I do not buy or listen to, let alone download/upload the latest potty-mouthed rapper or Britney-clone-bimbo recorded with today's dynamically-over-compressed crapppy studio effects. Unauthorized downloading of today's crap is a crime against musical taste, and should be outlawed for that reason alone.

    Secondly, this sets a very ugly precedent, if allowed to pass. Musical rights are like construction unions, there's a gazillion of them. The Songwriters and Recording artists are only two of them. There are also performance rights and reproduction rights and who knows what else. By the time they all get their pound of flesh, my $29.95 ADSL account will have a $15/month tax on it.

    But wait, it gets better, or should I say, worse. I'm sure the movie industry will want its $15/month, as will the TV industry. and e-book publishers, and software publishers. So now we're looking at a $75/month tax on my $29.95/month ADSL account.

    This money-grab must be stopped now.

What is an internet connection?

Alright, so who do you charge $5? Are you going to charge $5 on my cell phone because I can connect to the internet? What about businesses? Do you charge per employee or per connection? I could be downloading stuff from my business connection. How about college campuses? Do you charge for each connection or for each user? Do you make the college collect the money or does the government do it?. What about libraries? Do they pay? Or how about public wi-fi - the free and the paid variety? And how do you charge for prepaid cell phoness?

What if I have two internet connections for my house - one for business and one for work. And two cell phones. Oh, and a wifi connection for when I'm at the airport. That $25/month from what I can see.

This'll never happen just because of the rules involved.

Re:$5 Canadian??

Try $5.03 the Canadian Dollar is stronger than the US Dollar.

Re:$5 Canadian??

So who gets a share of the money? Who is legitimately a rights holder? How do you divide the money?

Re:$5 Canadian??

Probably the same way the blank media levy is collected/distributed: lump sums given out to the songwriters' and musicians' guilds, which is then distributed by the guild on basis of need. Quite a fair way to do things, really, and one that the majority of Canadian musicians support wholeheartedly.

I agree with the proposal with one caveat: it shouldn't be applied to *all* internet connections. Just the so-called "high speed" ones. Anything 1mbit and over. Anything under that isn't fast enough to make filesharing worthwhile. More importantly, you can get a "high speed" connection in Canada that's 128kbit or 256kbit. For surfing the Internet or checking your e-mail, it's plenty fast enough. Even a 1mbit connection, which is one step above the entry level, is plenty fast enough for surfing and e-mail, and a lot of people will choose these slower services because they are priced much lower than an actual high speed connection.

We shouldn't be applying a levy of $5/month to a dialup Internet account that, itself, only costs $2.95/month, especially when the purpose of that levy is to combat a practice on the Internet that the $3/month connection simply isn't capable of. I'd happily pay an extra $5/month on my 7mbit cable connection, however, if it got rid of the legal grey areas surroudning file sharing. (how it's legal for me to download, sorta, but illegal for me to upload, for example)

Re:$5 Canadian??

What about the three separate connections; two DSL and one cable, that I administer for remote locations to the business I run the network for? I have the firewalls and proxies set up to stop employees from downloading music and video, so should I have to pay $15 per month for a "service" which I am, in fact, expressely forbidding the networks to access?

Re:$5 Canadian??

What about the three separate connections; two DSL and one cable, that I administer for remote locations to the business I run the network for? I have the firewalls and proxies set up to stop employees from downloading music and video, so should I have to pay $15 per month for a "service" which I am, in fact, expressely forbidding the networks to access?

Ahh. You begin to understand the meaning of "socialism". By spreading the cost out among everybody, rather than just the people who use the service, you can reduce the overall cost for everybody. Kind of like how our medical system works: I'm 26 years old, and I had knee surgery in November of 2007. Before then, I'd never been in the hospital, but I'm still paying for the public health care as part of my taxes. Because I'd paid that health care in my taxes, however, my stay in the hospital for the knee surgery (ACL, Meniscus, and shaving a fracture on the underside of the patella that never healed properly) was completely free. Didn't cost me a dime. Nor did the painkillers I got (and never used after the day of the surgery).

It doesn't matter that you aren't using that functionality. By charging you a small amount of money, it reduces the overall cost for everybody else.

You do realise that Canada isn't a capitalist state, right?

Besides which, they may choose to implement it only on residential services. *shrugs* If you have a "residential" account and are using it for "business" purposes, one has to ask the question: why aren't you using a "business" account? I'm in that boat, too, btw. I have a DSL connection and a cable connection. I do all my hosting off the DSL connection, and my personal uses off the Cable connection. I still think it's a good idea.

Re:$5 Canadian??

Ahh. You begin to understand the meaning of "socialism". By spreading the cost out among everybody, rather than just the people who use the service, you can reduce the overall cost for everybody. Kind of like how our medical system works [...]

It doesn't matter that you aren't using that functionality. By charging you a small amount of money, it reduces the overall cost for everybody else.

$5/month is a bargain for those who enjoy getting new music at the rate of a CD every 2 months. When I was in my 20's, I would have agreed. Today, that's a rate almost 10 times greater than what I've spent on music over the last two years.

$5/month is a great deal for music, and maybe $10/month is good for movies, $30/month should be good for TV on demand compared to cable, and then there's video games, software, radio, subscription news, audiobooks, etc.; all of which might be digitally copied.

You can make a good argument for socialism on necessities like health care, education, road maintenance, etc., etc., but it makes a lot less sense when applied to luxuries. To categorize and treat them in the same way is a mistake.

Re:$5 Canadian??

that's what, like 10 cents here in America. Sweet, sign me up!

It's $4.97 [google.com] in USD.

Remember all that news about the U.S. dollar falling in the global market and all those morons were talking about it? Yeah, well, it actually turns out to have an impact in you making fun of how poor Canada is.

Re:$5 Canadian??

No problem, we'll just switch to gloating about how you pay a surcharge on books and stuff for no good reason now!