ch-homer said:
Where it now gets confusing is, why is the Canadian Recording Industry trying to get ISPs to hand over the identities of file sharers now? Your right Human (and so is the National Post), the levy is in place because they feel that anyone buying blank CDs or MP3 players in Canada must be steeling music, so they are getting their money (in fact they are getting their money TWICE from anyone who buys legal music).
No, go read the rationale behind the levy at
http://www.cb-cda.gc.ca/decisions/c12122003-b.pdf and the fact sheet at
http://www.cb-cda.gc.ca/news/c20032004fs-e.html . The levy is not to compensate for people stealing music, it is to pay for you to have the right to make copies of music you legally own. The copyright owners, strangely enough, have the right to make copies of their material, and so do you by paying for that right with your purchase of a CD-R. If you choose not to exercise that right by putting your own data on that CD-R instead of a copy of your latest Limp Bizkit album, so what.
If I read it right, you are actually in copyright violation if you copy such material to any media that does not have the levy applied to it - like your hard drive.
Also note, I do not personally say that I agree with this rationale, but it is expressly not to compensate for piracy. I feel that we should be purchasing the right to listen to the material we've purchased in any form that is convenient to the end user, and any costs associated with this relinquishing of limited copyright should be absorbed in the original purchase, not on related media. I can only listen to one song at a time, no matter if I have it on a CD, an iPod, my computer, or in my car's MPEG player. If I want to store all my music on my PC and stream it to other devices in the house or over the net to my computer at work, I should be able to do so, and in fact making the music more available to me to listen to where and how I wish is more likely going to make me buy more music, not less.