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Knopf Exposes CRIA’s Myths About Myths

Howard Knopf has a must-read post that responds to CRIA's Richard Pfohl's letter to the editor that in turn responded to my column on Canadian file sharing myths.

9 Comments

  1. Pfohl link points to your column by mistake
    Should point here http://www.thestar.com/article/649521

  2. Gene Simmons says:

    Slapity Slap
    Someone got put in their place.

  3. PetFoodz.Info says:

    Geist & Knopf for the Win!..
    It was my understanding that I can download for personal use due to the tariffs we pay on all blank media including hard drives.. CRIA prez responds with copying to hard drives is illegal? Then I think we should scrap the tariff system since CRIA doesn’t need tariff money then.. Their is no point to the tariff system if it is indeed true that downloading to hard drives etc is illegal.. Down with CRIA..

  4. PetFoodz: I understood the application for tariffs on hard drives was rejected. Thus they may be technically correct. The problem is that you rarely download and burn directly (I’ve never heard of anyone doing it) so at the very least it is staging through the hard drive, potentially meaning, if the hard drive is in fact not under tariff, that it could be interpreted as infringing, unless you could show that it was immediately burned and not played from the HD.

    For the record, I am not affiliated with the RIAA, CRIA or any of their drones.

  5. HITLER IS PROUD says:

    better yet refund the 400 mill you got from the levy
    anb you can come here and watch me destroy all those cdrs , i also want the full value of the cdrs PLUS taxes
    …but wait they won’t do that so you cant then retro actively call me a pirate. NOR can you know , that is defamation and slander.

  6. HITLER IS PROUD says:

    and too the noob Anon above
    what people do is downlaod get cdrs and then burn
    which is effectively a simple transfer form internet to HDD to cdr
    and you run out of space you used to go get cdrs 100 for about 25$ ( cheap enough with old rate of levy) but now with the increase why bother, all you did was raise the rate too high where now ill just save and buy anohter HD) now its 60$.

    And what i do is download and then burn what exactly am i missing form the guy above that he sees no one doing what i do? DUMMMY we all do it in that order.
    Might even make sure quality is there and watch it once.

  7. Re: and too the noob
    Hitler. Read my post again. I said download and burn directly. Meaning burn as it is being downloaded. You yourself indicated you download to your hard drive and then burn to a CD, which is the normal means of doing it. Which I indicated may be interpreted as infringing. If I understand it correctly, the burning to a CD is not considered illegal because of the levy paid on the blank. However, since there is no levy on the HD, the act of downloading to the HD may be considered as infringing. You may get away with it if, after burning to a CD, you delete the file from the HD. However, if you don’t, or if you never burn it, I suspect you are in a grey area there, or possibly even infringing. From the Copyright Board document:

    Although the source of the copy does not matter, the destination does. The Board believes that section 80 creates an exemption that applies as long as two conditions are met: the copy must be for the private use of the person making it, and it must be made onto an audio recording medium, as defined in
    section 79.

    Since you would be hard pressed to argue that the hard disk in a computer is a “audio recording medium”, the Section 80 created exemption is potentially not applicable.

    By the way, get a spell checker. I had to read through your posting a half dozen times in order to figure out what you said. Learn to read, and write. Or am I using too big of words for you?

  8. hard drives
    @Anon: “Since you would be hard pressed to argue that the hard disk in a computer is a “audio recording medium””

    I’m not sure why you would be hard pressed to argue this. A hard disk is just as much an audio recording medium as a cd is… It completely matches the definition in the copyright act (paraphrasing) as something that you can copy audio to and is normally used for that purpose. The definition has no mention that it must be the primary purpose for the medium, only that it is normally used for that purpose. I would certainly say that is a normal use for hard drives. They may have specifically excluded hard drives, but I couldn’t find anywhere that they did.
    As far as I can tell, it shouldn’t matter from the act if there is a direct levy on it.
    Is there a previous ruling that judged copies on hard drives illegal?

  9. @crade
    First of all, the Copyright Board, as I understand it, denied the request to put a levy on a hard drive when it was requested. I realize this is a bit of circular logic, but if they considered it as an “audio recording medium”, then I believe they would have allowed the levy.

    While I agree that, under the definitions in section 79 of the Copyright Act a hard drive would qualify as an “audio recording medium”, I understand that part of the reason for rejecting putting a levy onto a hard drive was that the medium is not (generally) removable. Since the court indicated that private copying was compensated for by the levy and thus exempt. I took that to mean that if the private copy is to a media for which the levy is not paid, then it would not be covered under the exemption. I may be misinterpreting this, however I hope you can follow my logic here.