Fact: File sharing has been deemed legal in Canada.

It has been declared by the Canadian Court system (for those that find it meaningful) that sharing music is not against the copyright law – that simply making digital copies of your own music and putting them in a shared folder does not break the law. In fact Canadian copyright law provides a means of making legal copies of CD’s even if you don’t own them, provided you make the copy to a storage media and it is for your own personal use.

Fact: We pay a levy on all blank media to compensate for this right.

We pay it on every blank VHS tape, every blank CD, every blank DVD we buy. This levy was approved based on the foresight that some copyright owners would be losing compensation for their arts in the foreseeable future, so rather than try to track all the holes in the system they passed the levy. The levy is being collected and held by the Canadian Private Copying Collective, which has started to distribute the collected funds in 2003. However if you visit their page, you may notice that in order to qualify for reimbursement the artist has to be Canadian.

Fact: I still buy CDs

I do not purchase music from the various online MP3 sellers, for two reasons:

  1. They sell me encoded versions of the songs, which is a lossy process. The songs I am downloading are not CD quality
  2. They sell me files with DRM (Digitial Rights Management) built in, wherein they can tell me how and when I am able to use the song I have purchased. This is not acceptible.

There are some sites online that sell lossless encoded DRM-free files, such as Zunior.  I’ve begun buying their lossless albums for a few reasons: lossless songs, liner notes with every album (PDF files), and fast service.  Their catalogue is distinctly Canadian, which is exactly how I want it.  I’ve begun buying fewer and fewer CDs now.  The digital stores help, but these CD cases are also not easy to produce in terms of environmental impact, so the fewer of them I buy, the better I feel.