A federal court judge has fined Vortek Systems, a Montreal-based electronics retailer, nearly one million dollars for failing to pay the private copying levy. The company was ordered to turn over the unpaid levy amounts ($1.65 million plus interest) along with a penalty of just over $900,000. Vortek denied that […]
Post Tagged with: "CRIA"
Keepmusiccoming.com Goes From Bad To Worse
I recently blogged about CRIA's failure to renew keepmusiccoming.com, which it used as part of its "educational" campaign to convince users to stop downloading. A blog reader has noted that the situation has gone from bad to worse as the site is now owned by a Russian download service offering […]
Music and the Market
In case you missed it, last week CRIA was back in the news claiming that Canadian copyright law is in need of reform, arguing that Canadian digital download sales have not met expectations. The copyright lobby group chose to focus on sales of Gwen Stefani's Hollaback Girl. In the U.S., the song has become the first to reach one million paid downloads. By comparison, in Canada it has hit 20,000 paid downloads. CRIA argues that based on population and broadband penetration rates, the Canadian figure should be 150,000.
I find this argument rather remarkable. CRIA is obviously hoping to convince Canadian Heritage Minister Bev Oda and Industry Minister Maxime Bernier that the Canadian digital music market has been hurt by the absence of anti-circumvention legislation, yet the notion that music sales are a function of population size and broadband access is certainly subject to challenge.
Class Dismissed?
In 2003, CRIA and others associated with the music industry launched a high profile "education" campaign on music and copyright. Titled Keep Music Coming, the campaign centered around a website at keepmusiccoming.com, supported by national advertising and inserts in CDs (archive.org version).
Today I received an email from someone who just purchased a CD which included an insert directing him to the campaign site. He was surprised to find that keepmusiccoming.com is no longer maintained by the industry as it has become a pay-per-click advertising site. The domain lapsed earlier this week with no indication whether this was a domain name registration error or if the campaign has been abandoned. Either way, music is still coming nearly three years after the campaign launch as a growing number of labels and artists want to respect their fans, not "educate" them.
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