Canadian Copyright Board Increases Blank Media Levy Rates

Says that it’s the economy stupid.

A report today on Exclaim Magazine says that the Canadian Copyright Board has raised the levy on CDs up 40 percent. That means that the levy will be bumped up from 21 cents to 29 cents and that the price of a spindle of 100 CDs will cost an additional $8. DVDs won’t be affected by the change.

Michael Geist said in the article that the bump in the levy doesn’t make any sense since many people burn music from legitimate sources like iTunes and paid for music albums. Also, many people back things up on DVDs now, probably because DVDs store more as another reason that doesn’t seem to be mentioned in the article.

The article rightly notes that various collectives have been lobbying to put a levy on iPods and removeable storage devices, but were unsuccessful.

One might wonder, though, has the economy been more of a scape goat than anything else as an excuse to do things that would otherwise spark controversy? Take, for instance, the increase in royalty rates on textbooks back in 2006. There wasn’t even a hint of an impending economic storm (unless you’ve been following Robert Schiff from the very beginning) and yet they pushed for increasing the royalty rates. Perhaps it’s thoughts like this that make the decision that much more confusing in the first place though. There’s no word on whether or not it’s a good idea to just stimulate the economy by encouraging consumer spending on entertainment products in the first place.