Canadians May Face iPod Tax

I'll have to pay some 'performing artist' for permission to use a SD flash card to store nautical charts I use for boating? You're crazy.

canada where's that? lol who cares it's canada! lol

This is an ILLEGAL TAX. ONLY PARLIAMENT may institute a tax of any kind. Bureaucracies within the government do NOT have this power.
Canadians need to contact their Members of Parliament and complain that the Copyright Board of Canada has no legal right to institute this, or any other tax.
And to the asinine (that means stupid, stupid!) yankee who asked where's Canada, you clearly don't know anything about the SPP, either, do you? You ought to learn, because when the CFR causes our three North American nations to MERGE, our LAWS merge too... and you'll be paying that tax before you can say "I've been screwed." Meanwhile, your darling President just took away your right to protest, and you probably don't even know about that either. DUH. Best of luck, turkey.

Another reason why I'm glad I don't live in Canada.

Thank you Dee N for your enlightened comments. Jerry and Tammy are part of the reason why so many ridiculous laws come to pass. Without the understanding that democracy is a privilege not a right, they will continue to lose their liberties.

You don't know where Canada (your biggest trading partner is?) and you're glad you don't live there, that is your right...now back to the issue of ipod tax.

You might call me a Luddite artisan, in the grand tradition... "The Luddites were a social movement of British textile artisans in the early nineteenth century who protested — often by destroying sewing machines — against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution, which they felt threatened their livelihood."

Artisans need to protest this so-called royalty tax, it is a scam and a very sneaky one based on a total misunderstanding of the new technologies.

The fact is, there needs to be huge disctinction made between the creative material and the medium it is delivered on. You don't tax the "MP3 file format" or the "CD disc" or "the player", you specify that the royalty tax is on the 'song' itself, the actual creative material. This tax is a cloaked snow job on people who barely understand the difference. A CD, memory card, media player or a file format is merely the carrier for whatever creative material is on it.

Another serious flaw in this proposed copyright levy on blank media is that artists and musicians themselves will also be taxed for archiving and loading devices with their own original material! I hear no suggestions of any kind of special artisan's membership card to avoid being caught in this suspicious money grab by the copyright board.

The reality is that by and large, the vast majority of sincere creative projects do not reach commercial markets and yet will still suffer the extra burden of this incidious 'value added' tax. Cultural development will be compromised as experimental projects and the Avante Garde find this tax just an extra unnecessary cost of being creative. Notwithstanding that such pure art for art sake is often only 'discovered' by the public years after an artisan dies.

The courts, Government and the Copyright board itself needs to seriously re-think this tax in terms of how it will impact the vast majority of creative people who do not necessarily live to produce commerical work but who still need to archive and use the new technologies to create. They should not be unfairly taxed for blank media. period. We all listen and record whatever we want on these devices, not necessarily commercially produced product.

I have to reiterate, I think it is a pre-emptive money grab on the technologically ignorant, afterall, recordable cassettes were never treated like this.

Artists do need to make money from their work, and many deserve to do so, but someone who is going to download a song or album illegally wouldn't buy the album in any case even if it was the only way he could get it, simply because people can't afford to buy every single album that they like. so they make choices and do buy some albums and download others. the artist isn't losing money because as i pointed out earlier they wouldn't buy the album becuase they can't afford. but at least they are appreciating the art work of the artist. after all most artists agree that art should be free. it's performance that costs!
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