New measure would add 2 cents to the cost of every legal music download.
The Copyright Board of Canada has approved a proposal by the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) to levy a tax on every digital music download sold online.
The tax would amounts would be as follows:
- Permanent downloads: 3.4% of the amounts paid by the consumer with a minimum fee of 1.7¢ per file in a bundle and 2.3¢ per file in all other cases;
- Limited downloads: 6.3% of the amounts paid by subscribers with a minimum fee of 60.9¢ per month, per subscriber, if portable downloads are allowed and 39.9¢ if not;
- On-demand stream: 7.6% of the amounts paid by subscribers with a minimum fee of 48.1¢ per month, per subscriber.
“On behalf of our songwriter and music publisher members, we are extremely encouraged by the Board’s decision,” says Paul Spurgeon, SOCAN’s VP Legal Services & General Counsel. “While the rates established by the Copyright Board are not exactly what we’d hoped for, they provide an excellent foundation for the management of performing rights royalties for online music use as the industry evolves in the future.”
SOCAN has been very aggressive in its pursuit of methods with which to offset the losses due to piracy. Back in July it was worked towards establishing a levy on media players and memory on the premise that they are used to store copyrighted material.
What’s kind of sad here is that once again people in the music industry have figured out a way to shoot themselves in the foot. Just as they are starting to convince people to purchase music legally online they go ahead and try to slap a tax on them for deciding to get music the right way.
I guess you really can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
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Um… so you get taxed for making them money… HOW DOES THIS MAKE SENSE?!?!? Man someone bitch slap our politicians.
That’s Canada for you I guess our tank was in BC at the time so we couldn’t fend them off I don’t mind paying a levy on recordable media I buy a tonne of DVDs and allot of it is legal download-ish even still I’d rather put up with a 20 buck hike on a 500 GB drive than worrying if CIRA’s going to try and chew me out for having a small library of music. However most of that is stuff that CIRA RIAA and god knows what else has no cares for because most of it isn’t even things they own however I’m sure they’d ‘fight the good fight’ over it if they could nonetheless.