Comment Re:Proudly Canadian (Score 1) 104
The nature of copyright has to evolve with current times and technologies, allowing P2P downloads for personal use while putting a fee on MP3 players and blank media is a compromise that I see as fair.
I think it might be nice for us Canadians since the levies are not too high, but still a horrible compromise.
Conceding that everyone who buys MP3 player or blank media is a sort of criminal by putting a levy on the player is a horrible idea to me. It gives everyone in the country a license to be a legitimate pirate, because they're paying the penalty whether they like it or not. What kind of logic is "don't do this, it's bad, but even if you don't, we're taking your money anyway"? I've heard Indy producers get hurt by the blank media tax (not sure how much that is true). And where does the money go? In communistic fashion it gets redistributed in some horribly inefficient and inaccurate way to people who some government agency thinks deserves it, and it is a breakdown of the free market.
As for music (and movies), I think part of the answer is to make stores more convenient. The first music store I bought a lot from was allofmp3, but I don't think it was legit. It was awesome, had a very large library, letting me download previews and buy in any format I wanted. I wouldn't have minded paying more to a legit store. I currently subscribe to emusic and they give super short music samples, which is idiotic and I plan to unsubscribe when I finish getting what I want from there. (I can't speak for iPod/iTunes because I hate all the Apple DRM and proprietary lock-in.) A lot of people care about convenience more than freeness, and a lot of people also want to contribute back to the artists they love who they think does deserve something. Perhaps a radical idea is that it would be great to have more of a culture of honour and tipping. Magnatune.com lets the customer decide how much to tip, and most of their customers do, knowing 50% goes directly to artists. I also think Beatport.com has a great interface overall.
I think our government should take an anti-draconian stand in the world and against the US lobbies, and committing (in legislation) to never sell the souls of consumers to content companies. This legal and technical arms race in **AA is a cancer in the world and needs to be stopped. The forced obsolecence of the HD analog mentioned recently on