Canadian Copyright Board's Rates Appear to Make Sense

What is it with our neighbors to the north? First they nationalize their health care, then they legalize the copying of media for personal use through a blank media tax, and now their Copyright Board has issued retroactive royalty rates (PDF) for 1996-2006 that appears to make a lot more sense than what the U.S. […]

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What is it with our neighbors to the north? First they nationalize their health care, then they legalize the copying of media for personal use through a blank media tax, and now their Copyright Board has issued retroactive royalty rates (PDF) for 1996-2006 that appears to make a lot more sense than what the U.S. Copyright Board came up with.

Here's what online music services will have to pay for music sent to Canadian users for those years:

- Permanent downloads: 3.4% of the amounts paid by the consumer with aminimum fee of 1.7¢ per file in a bundle and 2.3¢ per file in all othercases;

-Limited downloads: 6.3% of the amounts paid by subscribers with aminimum fee of 60.9¢ per month, per subscriber, if portable downloadsare allowed and 39.9¢ if not;

- On-demand stream: 7.6% of the amounts paid by subscribers with a minimum fee of 48.1¢ per month, per subscriber.

On the surface, at least, this percentage-based system (with the per-user minimums) looks a lot saner than our currently-debated plan to charge music services for each song sent to each listener (full coverage).

(via mi2n)