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Canadian Copyright Board Increases Blank Media Levy Rates

Jorge — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 01:08:31 +0000

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.

Car Searched on Suspicion of Home Made CDs

dubstylee — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 21:25:18 +0000

This is a court case from Virginia where officers searched a man’s car because they saw what appeared to be home made cds on the seat of the car. They then found marijuana and arrested the man. He appealed the decision and the eveidence of the marijuana was thrown out because of the unlawful search. What I find very interesting is the officers had “training from the recording industry in recognizing pirated cds.” What if the guy was a musician and it was his music? Talk about guilty until proven innocent. Where does the recording industry’s influence stop? They are conducting raids in foreign countries, training police here, what next? Their own terror squad?

Full Court Decision

Lala – a P2P NetFlix for swapping CDs

Jorge — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 21:40:01 +0000

A new Valley-based start up is updating the old idea of a swap meet for music fans. LaLa.com provides a site where you can find and trade legitimate CDs with other members. LaLa gives you a stack of cases and envelopes, and each CD you acquire from other members costs you $1, plus postage. That’s as much, the company points out, as a single DRM-encumbered, low bitrate song from Apple’s online music “store”. And somewhat less than the price of a ringtone.

LaLa says it will set aside 20 per cent of trading revenues to create a fund to compensate artists – who because of the ‘first sale doctrine’ in US law, currently don’t receive a penny from second hand trades.

LaLa’s CEO is serial entrepreneur Bill Nguyen, whose last venture was launching the mobile email software company Seven. LaLa also boasts Yahoo!’s erstwhile chief product guy Geoff Ralston. Anselm Baird-Smith, who helped devise the http 1.1 spec and was a Distinguished Engineer on eBay’s search engine – he designed its recommendation system – heads up a strong technical team. It’s backed by a $9 million investment from Bain Capital and Ignition Partners.