Canada’s Private Copying Levy charges 29 cents per CD-R, CD-RW, CD-R Audio, CD-RW Audio and MiniDisc sold in Canada. The CPCC then appropriates money to eligible composers, performers and makers. So far the CPCC has distributed 184M dollars. I think this levy is a very good idea. It supports the music industry, while recognizing that in the digital age copying of audio media is here to stay and cannot be prevented. The music industry has made examples of people by suing them, treating them as a means to an end, and they have taken down online P2P file sharing sites. Meanwhile, music copying online is still going strong! There are just too many people and computers on the internet for them all to be taken down, it is just not feasible. The levy on the other hand, seems to work. The industry gets paid, people get to make private copies – no one party is perfectly happy, but all are content at least. It’s a good compromise! Some people are opposed to the levy because it’s a tax that assumes that the buyer of blank media will use that blank media to copy copyrighted material, and it’s never good to assume. I think it’s a fairly good assumption in this case, though.
It’s interesting to see that there isn’t a levy on MP3 players mentioned on the CPCC site. I seem to remember the group who presented this topic in the CPSC430 lecture mention there was. Turns out that the levy on MP3 players was proposed, but then was turned down by the courts.
What about software developers though? They seem to have been left out of this levying system. People copy software just like they copy music. Why shouldn’t the software companies be compensated? Maybe the MP3 players levy should be charged, and the money collected from there would go to the music industry, while the money collected from blank media go to the software industry? Since people put music on MP3 players, and software on discs more often.