Hail to screwing the man because he’s screws us all the time

A copyright owner does not lose his work when it is copied. A copyright owner can still sell his work, if someone has copied it. In fact, the copyright owner may in some cases have suffered no loss at all even if his work is copied.

This is quite contrary to theft where the rightful owner does lose his property, is unable to sell it, and suffers a very tangible loss.

This does not mean that I condone unauthorized copying of music, movies or software. Quite the contrary. But please don’t use the corporate Newspeak.

Sweden also has a price added-on to cassettes, CDs, DVDs etc to try to cover up for pirated versions. But seriously, how fair and modern is that approach? How many people who download music and/or movies will burn it on a CD/DVD?

Music will be transferred right to the MP3 player and movies will be saved on a computer’s hard drive, or a hard-drive media center at home.

About DRM: I’m just not going to buy a (quite expensive anyway) DVD if I can’t be certain it will play in my DVD player, car-DVD-player, notebook player or a player at my friend’s house.

Or if I can’t make a backup copy. Don’t know about the cities you live in, but were I live it’s not a good idea to leave original CD/DVDs in your car (even hidden in the trunk).

Take a page from tele-marketers and offer something “extra” for those who buy. When you buy an exercise machine because of an info-mercial they always give you something extra as an incentive to buy, like a cookbook. Add something that you can’t download in the packaging to make it worthwhile to buy.

Finally, work on a campaign to change attitudes about stealing, and it is stealing no matter how it’s rationalized. The golden rule; “do unto others as you would have them do to you”, “honesty is the best policy”, “if you were the owner/song writer/band/movie producer… would you want this to happen to you?”. I’m sure you can think of more. If you don’t want to sponsor the message in advertisements, sponsor the message in movie and TV scripts.

Can someone tell me where the US ranks in population growth for the target demographic? Can you also tell me how many people live outside the US that fit the target (both in age and disposable income)?

Of course there’s always going to be piracy, but I do like the idea of better quality movies or what have you for a cheap price. Maybe they could even burn the name or id of the buyer within the movie itself, to deter people from sharing (if you get what I mean).

You’re right though Robert, I would gladly pay if it wasn’t so expensive. I even find .99 cents ridiculous for an MP3 file. .50 sounds so much better, or even cheaper. Just like Hockey in Canada, it took them forever to realize nobody was physically going to the games anymore because the prices were ridiculous. Sometimes it’s better to lower your prices, to increase sales (simple philosophy).

Now.. if the cell companies would wake up and realize $2.50 for a ringtone is out to lunch!

I am a Canadian but that doesn’t really mean I know anything more about the tax on CD/DVD-R than anyone else here. However, the tax must be small because, on sale this week, you can get a stack of 100 Fujitsu DVD-R discs for $25. I can’t imagine that the tax would really be enough to cover the lost royalties on the 100 movies you could record to these discs.

You can see old and new levys (not taxes) here:
http://www.cb-cda.gc.ca/new-e.html

Proposed for 08-09 is:
$0.29 : audio cassette over 40min long.
$0.29 : CD-R/CD-RW
$0.85 : ‘audio’ CD-R, ‘audio’ CD-RW, Minidisc
$2.00 : per ‘memory card’ 256MB - 1GB
$5.00 : per ‘memory card’ 1GB - 4GB
$25 : per ‘recorder’ 1GB - 10GB
$50 : per ‘recorder’ 10GB - 30GB
$75 : per ‘recorder’ > 30GB

66% of the levy is paid to the SOCAN, CMRRA, and SODRAC, 19.9% to NRCC for ‘performers’, and 15.1% to NRCC for ‘makers’.

The current levy schedule is pretty close to that.

‘memory card’ applies to SD, MM, and MemoryStick cards. Other formats are covered in some legalese document elsewhere.

The costs are more or less covered since the *vast* majority of disc and memorycards sold are not used to store pirated movies/songs, they’re used for more mundane purposes.

Secondly, I agree with all of Robert’s comments with the minor exception of his assessment of a downloading fee of $5/movie. Given that rental shops charge just slightly more than that (albeit for a short-term rental and with a significant delay in availability), I think that closer to $3/movie would be the price point that buyers would be attracted to downloading.

A quote:

Any cure which relies on tighter regulation of the market — especially the kind of extreme measures being advocated by some people — is far worse than the disease. As a widespread phenomenon rather than a nuisance, piracy occurs when artificial restrictions in the market jack up prices beyond what people think are reasonable. The “regulation-enforcement-more regulation” strategy is a bottomless pit which continually recreates (on a larger scale) the problem it supposedly solves. And that commercial effect is often compounded by the more general damage done to social and political freedom.

The solution was to add a royalty tax to the devices in the case of cassette and video recorders; the movie and recording industries weren’t totally satisfied with the solution, but it struck a balance.

Canada made a similar move with mass storage devices which all carry a tax paid to the industry under the assumption that everyone is at least part pirate. I don’t entirely agree with the premise (everyone is guilty, tax them all) but it might be the only solution.

Anyone, who is, say, 25+ of age, have grown up in a world where you actually had to buy what you wanted, in terms of records and movies.

I’m not sure if I agree on this. Of course, I’m not 25+ of age, but my father told me stories about taping CDs or radio shows on cassette, and while this is of course not comparable to today’s quantity of illegally copying/reproducing media, it’s basically the same thing and in that particular time frame just as illegal.

Regarding movies, my conscience is clean, seeing that 60% of my income goes straight into my DVD collection