p2pnet - rss feed: New Big Music Canada report
p2pnet.net News:- The Big Five record labels are suing people who share music online as fast as they can identify them, but dedicated and unswerving support from the mainstream print and electronic media notwithstanding, they’re not getting far in Canada where it’s been one defeat after another.
The latest attempt to gloss its failures over comes in a study commissioned by the music industry owned CRIA (Canadian Recording Association of America) which says 28% of 1,200 people surveyed between March 12 and April 5 reported buying less music in the last 12 months mainly because of downloading, file sharing and CD burning.
Only people who’d either bought music or downloaded from file-sharing sites in the past six months were surveyed, says a Canadian Press story here.
In the US and elsewhere, Big Music does more or less what it wants, suing people said to have shared music online without its permission.
None of the suits have ever been resolved in open court because the plaintiffs, including senior citizens and children, can’t even begin to afford going up against the Big Five with their bottomless pockets and heavyweight legal teams.
Victims always settle out of court and things will undoubtedly be the same in Canada, if only the CRIA can gain a foothold for its masters.
However, it’s going nowhere fast at the moment, help from Canada’s prime minister Paul Martin notwitstanding. It also lost another valuable ally when Canada’s Liberal Party got through the federal elections by the skin of its teeth.
Among those in prime minister Paul Martin’s cabinet to bite the dust was heritage minister Hélène Chalifour Scherrer who, said the Globe and Mail just before the big day, was, “expected to accuse the Conservatives today of scheming to sell out the country’s identity”.
This was ironic given that Scherrer was ready to re-write Canada’s copyright laws to enable the Big Five record labels to open Canada and Canadians up to lawsuits.
Its attempts to use Canada’s legal system to compel ISPs to identify users had already failed miserably. In the process Justice Konrad von Finckenstein ruled that putting music into a computer directory that may, or may, not be shared by someone else online doesn’t constitute copyright infringement under Canadian law.
The case is under appeal, but in the meanwhile the CRIA has been going blue trying to convince people that file sharing is “devastating” the multi-billion-dollar music industry owned by the five major record labels, none of which has a base in Canada.
More recently, in another major blow to the music industry, ISPs are “intermediaries” who aren’t bound by Canadian copyright legislation, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled.
The CRIA tried to describe this defeat as a “clarification,” saying it was a, “very good outcome for Canadian record companies” because it “clearly affirms … Canada’s Copyright Act”.
When the decision came down, CRIA boss Brian Robertson tried to dress it up as a positive for Big Music. “The recent, widespread publicity on the Federal Court ruling seems to have heightened the awareness of the Canadian public to copyright issues,” he said.
It certainly did.
Stay tuned.
July 7th, 2004 at 6:21 pm
heard that report mentioned on the radio this morning, CRIA mentioned that record sales were down due to filesharing??? Is that true given whats happening in the rest of the world (rising sales)?
July 8th, 2004 at 5:03 am
Maybe just Maybe the CRIA pissed off the Canadian music fans and now they have to take their Lumps!!!!! You Think???????
July 8th, 2004 at 1:20 pm
Maybe Canada is down because they have one of the highest internet user rates (not to mention high spead access?)