By Charles W. Moore
© 2000 Charles W. Moore
Federal Heritage minister Sheila Copps dropped a big lump of coal in a lot of Canadians' Christmas stockings last Friday, with the Copyright Board's announcement of rates for her new "levy" on recordable media, which is intended to provide compensation to recording artists for people pirating copyrighted music off records, tapes and CDs
The legislation has actually been in effect since March 19, 1998,
but the Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC) the group representing recording industry interests which is responsible for collecting the levy and distributing revenues collected, had agreed to delay collecting the levy on blank audio recording media until the Board rendered its decision on the rates or until December 31, 1999, whichever was earlier.
The government insists that the new charge is a "levy," and not a tax, because it is not collected by any level of government, which sounds like a pretty weak rationalization to some ears. When the government takes your money by force of law, in most people's books that's a tax, whatever euphemism the lawmakers choose to tack on it.
That's what the Independent Canadian Recording Media Coalition (ICRMC), an alliance of small, medium and large businesses as well as individuals, churches and religious organizations who are collectively opposed to the levy/tax on recordable media say. The ICRMC argues that:
- This is not a levy -- IT IS A TAX!
- It unfairly penalize millions of Canadians who never tape any music
- It is unfair, unjust, and quite likely UNCONSTITUTIONAL!
Indeed, it is to be hoped that someone will challenge the constitutionality of Ms. Copps' legislation, which essentially abandons the principle of "innocent until proven guilty" by presupposing indiscriminately that everyone who purchases blank tapes and CDs is a thief. This constitutes a fascinating new innovation in jurisprudence; levy the fine presumptively before the crime.
Making copies of copyrighted material for private use is legal under Canada's revised copyright legislation, and the new tax/levy is actually a quid pro quo enacted to get the industry to agree to the "private copying legislation." However, since there was never any notable public demand to make private copying legal, who is this law meant to serve? One suspects that few private individuals ever felt any more inhibited by copyright law from, say, taping copies of their LP records onto cassettes, than they would about photocopying pages from a book or magazine.
No, as the Copyright Board concedes, while copying any sound recording for almost any purpose infringed copyright prior to the private copy legislation, in practice, the prohibition was for all intents and purposes unenforceable due to today's copying technologies. Recognizing this, the recording industry convinced the government to set up a straw man in the form of making legal the private copying many people were doing anyway, and then demanding compensation in the form of the recordable media levy/tax.
"The tax on recordable media will only serve to further pad the wallets of high- profile artists and will do little to assist struggling, up-and-coming musicians," says the Canadian opposition Reform Party's Heritage critic Inky Mark.
The rates set by the Copyright Board as of Dec. 17 are:
Analog Audio Cassette Tapes (40 minutes or longer): 23.3 cents per tape
Analog Audio Cassette Tapes (less than 40 minutes): no levy
MiniDiscs, CD-Rs Audio and CD-RWs Audio: 60.8 cents per CD/disc
CD-Rs and CD-RWs: 5.2 cents per CD
Microcassettes (used mainly in dictating machines) and digital audio tapes (DATs) are exempt.
Most onerous for the general public is the audio cassette levy. Every individual who uses cassettes (except for very short ones) to record church services, speeches, meeting minutes, voice letters, secretarial dictation, or other non-music content will have to cough up cash to fatten the wallets of needy people like Bryan Adams, Shania Twain, Celine Dion, and Alanis Morrisette.
The Copyright Board estimates that the total volume of leviable blank audio recording media sold in Canada in 2000 will be approximately 105 million units. If this projection proves correct, the new levy/tax is expected to generate approximately $9 million dollars in 2000.
Another aspect of this farrago is that it may have consequences that its architects never envisioned. When told about the levy/tax, a young acquaintance of mine who owns a CD-burner commented: "I guess this means that it's now OK to pirate all we want."
It is obvious that copyright legislation drafted back in the horse & buggy days of the movable type printing press and wax recordings is woefully inadequate for the digital era, and band-aid workarounds like this "levy" are utterly unsatisfactory solutions to deal with the paradigm shift.
© 2000 Charles W. Moore
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