In the annals of Canadian copyright royalty fights, few can match Tariff 22 for pure stamina and longevity. First introduced in 1995 by SOCAN, thirteen years later the proposal is still the source of much disagreement. Indeed, years after the Supreme Court of Canada dismissed an attempt to implement a tariff on Internet service providers for the music transmitted over their networks, the Copyright Board of Canada issued a new decision on Friday that addressed the prospect of establishing a royalty on hundreds of thousands of websites ranging from social network giants such as Facebook to thousands of Canadian podcasters.
My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes that while Friday's decision is not limited to social networks and podcasters – the decision established royalty rates for, among others, Internet-based radio stations that are deemed to be high users of music (5.3 percent of revenues), electronic games sites (0.8 percent of revenues), and non-commercial radio station webcasts (1.9 percent) – it is the "other sites" category that encompasses everyone from MySpace to a solitary website featuring a small amount of music that will rightly attract the most attention.
