Reaction Part 3: CRCC Feels DMCA Is Too Lenient

BY Shane SinnottPublished Jun 13, 2008

A group called the Canadian Private Copyright Collective – self-described as a non-profit agency in charge of collecting and distrusting royalties – is feeling burned by Canada’s new copyright legislation.

In a move that’s baffling to understand at first, they’ve issued a release crying foul because the new law doesn’t have specific penalties for copying illegally downloaded music to iPods. Or at least, that’s what I think (they could use a better press release writer as the argument is pretty confusing).

The logic seems to be that the new law covers legally purchased CDs and authorised downloads (i.e. you can get in trouble for putting those "locked” things on your iPod) but not the vast majority of material filling the hard drives of everyone’s favourite music player: namely, that huge Limewire or Bittorrent folder you have on your PC.

But they also take issue with getting cut out of the legal copying action: "While everyone else in the value chain, from the maker of the MP3 player to the retailer, would be compensated for the contribution to the private copying of music, the people who provide the content would receive nothing.”

Again, the fuzzy logic seems to be that artists should be paid multiple times for their work – once for the CD you buy, and once again when you copy it to your iPod. Good luck with that.

Their final argument is a thinly disguised plea for their long ago doomed "iPod tax.” They suggest (without actually mentioning the tax) that the law be extend to allow people to copy music to iPods: "This approach would have the advantage of legalizing all music copying onto iPods and MP3 players, while providing remuneration to music creators [i.e. the Tax].”

Good luck with that too.

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