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[personal profile] dewline
Something I noticed on Russell McOrmond's blog at digital-copyright.ca.

Not sure how seriously to take this, but it's starting to smell like Ottawa and CPCC are treating this CD-R levy as a "sin tax", like you see on booze, tobacco and gasoline. All to the benefit of "Big Music".

Well, something I'm currently thinking -- I may change my mind tomorrow -- is this: why should the music lobby be the only ones to benefit? I do no music downloads as a general rule, unless it's legit freebies from the musicians' own sites. I do burn the odd CD-R as part and parcel of my illustration work. And I suspect that I'm not the only illustrator in Canada who does this. Nor the only writer in Canada, for that matter.

Why shouldn't all creators get a cut of that particular tax pie back from what we put into it? Assuming that the levy never goes away, that is.

Awaiting counter-arguments...

Bad idea...

Date: 2006-01-04 03:28 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
A levy system only works when everyone in a given area are using the same business model, namely collecting royalties on some "pay per" business model, and where the "pay per" units are the same (Per song played on radio, per copy on mechanical media, etc).

I am a software developer using Free/Libre and Open Source Software licensing http://flora.ca/floss , and do not use a "pay per" business model. I charge customers up-front once for the value-add that I add to the existing pool of FLOSS software.

Any levy system on software would screw me over royally, and essentially be a system where my customers are forced to subsidize competing software that they are not using.

The same is true of non-softare authors who are using different business models which a levy system cannot account for.


Russell McOrmond -- http://flora.ca/

Re: Bad idea...?

Date: 2006-01-04 04:00 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dewline.livejournal.com
Something there for me to think over, at any rate, Russell.

I'll be interested to see who else weighs in on this and their respective opinions. I hope to learn from this discussion.

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