A Faulty Levy (Not the New Orleans kind)
February 14, 2007 By Andrew Rideout
Categories: General
The Candian Private Copying Collective has proposed a new tariff on MP3 players and memory sticks that could see the price of a 30 GB iPod kicked up an additional $75. It's not a tax, folks, it's a levy. It will already be tacked on to the price at the retail level—and that's the genius part. Future Shop is going to have to pay for it themselves, and then pass the bill on to you. That's because you're going to take that MP3 player and fill it up with all kinds of illegal, pirated music that is somehow going to put both Tom Cochrane and Nickelback into the poorhouse. Aren't you?
The CPCC is an association of composers, recording artists, publishers, and record labels. I wonder who holds most of the power out of those four? If you have lots of time on your hands, go ahead and read their proposal in its entirety right here and immerse yourself in as much legaleze as you can handle. But if you're a busy person and want to know the gist of it, just have a look at the pricing scheme.
So, after having assumed that you've read the links and know what you're talking about, I invite you to add to my list of questions that I am going to personally attempt to pose to David Baaskin, the guy they quote in the Globe and Mail article that initially tipped me off about the whole story.
So, (deep breath), here goes:
* If the levy on a CD-R is 29 cents and a CD-R contains approximately 700MB of storage space and my $40 MP3 player only holds 1 GB, why am I forced to pay $5? I could use that $5 to fill up 17 full CD-Rs with pirated music for a grand total of 11,900MB of pirated music. By that logic, a 30 GB iPod should only cost me about 13 bucks extra. Apparently, 30 GBs of pirated music on an iPod is worth $75 but 30 GBs worth of CD-Rs is tantamount to $13.
* What happens if I buy an MP3 player at a pawn shop? Am I forced to pay again?
* All of the wording in your legal documents refers to blank media. What happens if an iPod is sold with songs preloaded by the manufacturer? It is no longer a blank disc and could be used solely for promotional purposes. U2 and Apple have released an iPod pre-loaded with their own music. This is no longer a blank storage medium and is therefore not subject to the levy. Right?
* If your concern is really about the artists being compensated for their music, and all we're concerned about here is the artists, is it okay for me to just send a $75 cheque to Bryan Adams? I'll even include a picture of me listening to my brand spankin' new 30 GB iPod while rocking out to “Cuts like a knife.” Seriously, if you are as genuinely concerned with the artists as you claim to be, why can't I just cut out the middle man and send them the money directly. That's not going to happen, because the CPCC is going to want to keep a big chunk of however much is collected. Then, it's probably safe to say that the record labels themselves are going to keep another piece of it to improve the bottom line for the shareholders, after all, they lost out too. I can't mail a cheque to Oscar Peterson because the CPCC couldn't care less about Oscar Peterson, they care about their financial backers—the people who own record labels. Here's something I've known since I was nine years old and read an interview with MC Hammer on the pages of Disney Adventures: if you're a musician and you sell a CD for $25, you get to see about a dollar by the time everybody is done taking a little slice for themselves.
* If we are committing a crime not by sharing files per se, but merely by purchasing a device that can be used to play these types of files (along with many others) how is it legal to sell those items in a store? Is an agreement to pay this levy an admission of guilt? By paying the levy, has a consumer admitted culpability to file sharing? If some of the files he copies and shares wind up in Japan or Sweden or Saudi Arabia, has he broken a law? Furthermore, has the levy exonerated him from prosecution? If by paying the $75 on his 30 GB iPod, is that person entitled to 30 GB worth of pirated software, because he can safely assume that all artists have been appropriately compensated or is he entitled to as much pirated software as he can handle?
* Have you even asked yourself what Apple is going to think about this? That $75 could have been spent at the iTunes store on legitimate, legal MP3s.
* What happens if an MP3 player is given as a gift? Why should I be made to pay for what my irresponsible uncle Jim is going to download? Why should I foot the bill when he only uploads recordings of himself and his one-string bass?
* Do you not think you will feel retailer's wrath on this one?
* What happens if the phone I'm buying plays MP3s? What happens if the phone is subsidized on a contract plan? Who pays the levy?
*Your levy only seems to pertain to Digital Audio Recorders. What happens if somebody is using a portable player that doesn't record anything and merely streams audio from a nearby (or networked) computer through Wi-Fi or Bluetooth? This technology already exists. Since nothing is being recorded, apparently no levy is necessary.
* Correct me if I'm wrong, but since distributing or illegally downloading copy-written material is a crime, how can you add a supposed levy or tax onto something that is illegal?
Those are just questions that came off the top of my head. Do you have any other questions you would like cleared up about the proposed levy? Do you think the levy is a good idea? Post a comment and let's see where the discussion goes.
Andrew Rideout
0 Comment(s) ·
del.icio.us ·
Digg it ·
Furl ·
reddit ·
Email
Is it time for us to stop flying?
February 8, 2007 By Danny Bradbury
Categories: Green Tech
I was in the states for a couple of days in December. It was only a short flight—about 1,600 miles one way and then back again. I saw a new town, met the CEO and a few other execs, picked up a few story ideas and a quote or three for some features I was working on, and then we went to dinner.
On the drive to the restaurant, we all got onto the subject of global warming. We talked about the Al Gore documentary and shook our heads sadly, as I have done with like-minded people many times before. “It seems pretty obvious to me, from the evidence at hand, that it’s a reality and that we’re changing the planet,” said one exec.
Fun time, very productive, and aside from the business stuff, we all felt very wise, having put the world to rights. The next day I sped home.
As soon as I got back, my wife mentioned an interesting show she’d heard on CBC Radio. The guest was Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who wrote “Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning.” Monbiot was discussing ecotourism in the context of climate change, arguing that it was a paradoxical concept. By flying to get to the places that are in danger of disappearing or being drastically altered due to climate change, he worries that people are contributing to the climate change that is causing them to disappear.
So how much to planes contribute to global warming? I did a bit of digging. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put the contribution of aviation to global climate change at about 3.5 per cent in 1992. It presents varying scenarios for future emissions from the aviation sector, drawing data from different organizations. The projections predict that the contribution to radiative forcing from aircraft will increase by between 2.4 per cent to 11 per cent over 1992 levels by 2050.
Issues factored into these scenarios include the likely possibility that regions currently expanding their air travel industries now will be able to do so more quickly than already-established regions did, because the technology for commercial air flight is now readily and cheaply available. Consequently, a lot of the scenarios show accelerated growth for air travel as these regions develop economically and then come online.
What does Monbiot say about this? Don’t fly, basically, unless your life depends on it. Enough talk, he says, what we need is action, and that requires sacrifices. Planning a business trip that isn’t absolutely essential? Forget it. Want to fly and see your loved ones each year? Don’t—go and see them every few years, and stay for longer.
Of course all of that would hurt. It has a significant impact on our everyday lives, and to be frank I don’t know if I could stop having my mum over every year, or forego the luxury of seeing friends and family occasionally. My mum’s over sixty. I like to see her as often as I can and once a year isn’t enough for me as it is.
But it does lead me to question our use of business trips. Whenever a company has called me and said “Come see us” I’ve generally gone. It has meant two or three days out of the office, which lowers my productivity, but I have gone anyway on the basis that meeting new people and learning new things will be worth the trip. Now, however, I’m becoming less certain that this is a good thing and I’m searching around for alternatives.
Consequently, I’m starting to change my mind about videoconferencing. Until now I’ve seen it as a bit of a gimmick, but I’d like to think that it might be able to replace at least some of the trips that we take, and make the face to face meetings less frequent. I don’t know about you but on the press trips I often attend, 90 per cent of the time is spent sitting in front of PowerPoint slides anyway.
What would be missing from the videoconference is the social bit—the one-to-one chats over coffee or dinner after the presentation, which is often where most of the good stories come from. You don’t get the same level of interaction over a video link, because they’re still so formal. If I conducted a videoconference rather than flying to see that firm in December, I may not have sat next to one guy at dinner and talked to him about his job before he came to this company, or discussed with another what it was like to live and work in that particular town. But sometimes I think the sacrifices may be worth it.
And I do believe that those more natural interactions would come, if the arrangements were not so formal. If we were all cammed up and we could just flick a switch and start visual nattering, conversations would become more fluid.
The trouble is that most of us working in the technology sector aren’t really geared up to do this. Since when did a corporate procurement department include a webcam in a standard desktop spec? I use a Mac now, and an iSight camera. On lower-end Macs, the cameras are for the most part built in. When other Macced-up friends pop up on instant messenger and we talk, it’s magic. It just works, and the quality is very good. But PC equipment is designed to be as cheap as possible, which means that few corps will tolerate the extra few bucks necessary for a built-in camera.
I’ve started fielding the question of video conferences with people when they ask me on trips. No wonder that when I ask this question, people seem a little doubtful and tell me they’ll get back to me (I’m still waiting and I’m not hopeful). It’s understandable because ad hoc videoconferencing isn’t part of a normal working day for them or the executives they represent.
It’s a bizarre world that we live in. I’m constantly hearing rhetoric about the communications revolution, and yet we’ve all been taught that it’s perfectly natural to spend days out of the office and burn tons of fuel just so that we can feel someone’s handshake and get the weight of them. The more that I think about it, the more I’m coming to believe that there’s something very wrong with this.
Shouldn’t we begin travelling less for business, and trying to build the infrastructures that enable us to do that? That way, the next time I start telling someone how shocked I was by An Inconvenient Truth, my words won’t feel quite as hollow.
Danny Bradbury
0 Comment(s) ·
del.icio.us ·
Digg it ·
Furl ·
reddit ·
Email
|
