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Keep Blaming Canada Essay

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Keep Blaming Canada

In 1999, Shawn Fanning and his little program called Napster created quite a stir in society. Napster's software allows music listeners to open pieces of their personal hard drives to everyone using Napster, sharing whatever MP3 songs they have already downloaded or stored. At any time, thousands of people are online, sharing hundreds of thousands of songs, many of which are technically illegal to download without the permission of the copyright holders. [1] This led to a lawsuit filed by the Recording Industry Association of America, with the rock group Metallica as its frontman. In this case, several issues were brought up, one of which was the right of the creator of the music to control what happens with …show more content…

This is the permission of people to make private copies of music for themselves. But realizing that people would make copies for friends and family, the government decided to try and compensate the artists. They added in a provision for the imposition of a levy on blank audio recording media. The money from this tax would go to the artists and authors of the music.

But with the effects of Napster and pressures from recording artists and other organizations being felt, Canada had to address the issue of peer-to-peer transfers of electronically stored music. On December 12, 2003, the Copyright Board of Canada decided that peer-to-peer uploading was illegal, but downloading would remain legal. The peer-to-peer component of the decision was prompted by questions from consumer and entertainment groups about ambiguous elements of Canadian law. Previously, most analysts had said uploading was illegal but that downloading for personal use might be allowed. "As far as computer hard drives are concerned, we say that for the time being, it is still legal," said Claude Majeau, secretary general of the Copyright Board. [3] The boards decision was based on the interpretation of the fact that the country's copyright law does allow making a copy for personal use, but does not address the source of that copy or whether the

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