What a way to start the day – I read this, which is the notice from the Canadian Copyright board of proposed increased tariffs on just about any recordable media. It starts out very optimistically, with a great discussion of the democratic process and all the options you have to make objections. I was feeling pretty good until I got to the bottom of page 5, “limitations on the powers of the board“, where it says that anyone planning on making an objection has to realize the following: there has to be a levy, it can’t be set at the retail level, it has to be applied to all media, regardless of whether it’s used to record music or not, and they can’t give exemptions to anyone except organizations that represent people with perceptual disabilities. Wow, so many options… 59 cents per CD-R, 21 bucks per gig on the iPod, and now they’re even charging on flash memory. How long before FireWire portable hard drives get hit?
I’ve talked about this before, and I’m tired of it. The Canadian Private Copying Collective is calling me a thief to justify their bad business practices. This is like McDonald’s winning a tax on paint to offset costs of vandalism during an economic protest, because spray painting a window is the only possible valid use for paint products.
In other news, I can barely walk today… Ow.