Internet Music Sales in Canada

Albert Gedraitis - 07:16am Sep 8, 2004 PST

Adam Engst's latest on the Music War/s, "Internet Music Battles Heat Up" is a topnotch report and analysis. Given the number of us affected directly by and otherwise interested in this War, Adam should win some kind of award somewhere!

<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07802>

[Ironically, I did win an award on Monday. :-) Before finishing that article, I ran and won a local 5K race, defending my title from the previous year even though I was 45 seconds slower than last year due to a lack of conditioning hanging on from health issues in the spring. Gotta love small local races when no one faster shows up. -Adam]

By the way, he mentions Canada and obliquely touches for a second on Apple's oblique relationship to the digital music market here. Apple iTunes baggages its Music Store in its iTunes app and versions here, but the Music Store is nonfunctional here (so we carry a bit of dead weight when we inherit or download the iTunes app; I guess we all use it for its Library and Live Streams chiefly). Why? you may ask. Since the beginning of 2004, the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled on three separate occasions to the effect that file-sharing when not for sales/profit is thoroly legit in Canada: the precedent case covered photocopying on the free copy machine at the Great Library of a university's Law School; the second case was one in which the music industry (our version of RIAA) tried to sue end-users who upoloaded their music for free downloading by others, of digitally-recorded music not for sale/profits by such file-sharing; and the third case turned back the complaint of our national Songwriters Association (among others) in trying to exact royalties from file-sharing app providers like LimeWire. Apple's iTunes has an ever-complicating quandry in supplying music lovers within free-music Canada's healthy system, given those who are monitoring Apple's behaviours vis à vis these issues. On the other hand, Apple is not recognizing our freedom and refuses to sell to us thru Music Store in restraint of free trade to which both countries, Canada and the USA with Mexico, are signatories thru NAFTA. The legalities of the case, according to our highest court, turn on a historical legal definition of "distribution" here, something deep in our legal tradition.

Back to my main point: Thanks much, Adam!

Yours, Owlbird