BNL meets with Bev Oda
p2p news / p2pnet: Barenaked Ladies’ Steve Page and Broken Social Scene’s Brendan Canning met with Canadian heritage minister Bev Oda and industry minister Maxime Bernier to ask them to treat online music lovers with respect.
Page, Canning and other high-profile Canadian musicians recently banded together to form the Canadian Music Creators Coalition (CMCC). In its first white paper, “Fans who share music are not thieves or pirates,” the members state. “Sharing music has been happening for decades.”
The members of the Big Four Organized Music gang are using every kind of pressure they have available to compel the new Canadian government to adjust its copyright laws to fall in with Big Music business plans.
This includes turning Canada into a marketing division where online music lovers can be pilloried if they don’t buy Big Four product.
In the US, it’s now SOP for the labels to try to blackmail people into buying their high-priced, low-fidelity downloads with subpoenas, and BNL’s management company, Nettwerk Music, recently promised to pay the legal costs for a Texas family being threatened by the labels’ RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America).
In another Canadian effort to help US victims, p2pnet readers – the site is also based in BC – have so far contributed $13,434 to help the Santangelos in New York mount the first-ever defense against the RIAA before a jury in a civil court.
The CMCC doesn’t want Ottawa to bring in copyright laws, “that make it easier to sue those who download or to prevent digital music from being played on different formats,” says the Canadian Press.
Page has suggested compensating the industry through levies imposed on blank media – something already being done with blank CDs.
The Big Four, none of whom have a significant presence in Canada, are using their CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association of America) to try to bully the Canadian government into meeting music industry demands.
They are Warner Music, USA, Sony BMG, Japan and Germany, EMI, Britain, and ivendi Universal, France.
NDP heritage critic Charlie Angus, himself a musician, says the message from the bands is loud and clear – digital downloading will not be the death knell of Canadian music. Rather, it’s, “created exciting opportunities for bands across the musical spectrum”.
“This is not a debate between bands who want to give music away and bands who want to be paid,” the official NDP site has him saying.
“This issue is about artists who have adapted to new digital markets and an industry that is trying to use legislation to impose a 20th century business model on a new generation of fans. There is no going back. Canadian bands have thrived and adapted. It’s time Parliament woke up to this fact.”
Angus, a two-time Juno nominee with the band Grievous Angels, says the copyright agenda has been largely driven by corporate interests, adding:
“it’s important to have the coalition at the table when new legislation is drafted. New copyright legislation will have profound implications not just for music fans but for students, educators and software innovators. The music coalition is giving politicians a badly needed wake up call.”
Also See:
banded together – ‘Fans who share music aren’t thieves’, April 26, 2006
Canadian Press – Canadian artists press Ottawa on copyright law, May 9, 2006
May 10th, 2006 at 10:22 pm
I really wish you would stop calling CRIA the Canadian Recording Industry Association of America. It is the Canadian Recording Industry Association.
I realise you think you are being clever, but it only serves to embarass you.
May 11th, 2006 at 3:17 am
Hi,
It’s me the shill again. Still licking boots.
May 11th, 2006 at 3:44 am
Tell me, are there any labels based in Canada? Nope. All the CRIA is doing is being an RIAA, doing what they ask. They are indeed the CRIAA.
May 11th, 2006 at 10:16 am
While I totally agree that the music industry needs a wake up call, the idea that the music industry is based in America is far from the truth. One of 4 is, the rest are as foriegn to us as it is to you.
There is some speculation that Warner may not be American for much longer with merger threating to take care of that.
May 11th, 2006 at 4:27 pm
CRIA, RIAA, and the other so-called “national” Recording Industry Associations are controlled by the same 4 transnational labels that do not have the domestic interests of any nations musicians at heart. While one of these labels claims USA as their home, none of them claim Canada as their home.
Whether or not CRIA is “American” is legitimately debatable, just as whether or not the RIAA is “American” is legitimately debatable.
What is clear is that there is nothing Canadian about CRIA.
May 11th, 2006 at 4:28 pm
Sorry – I wasn’t logged in when I wrote that…