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Topic: Belgian copyrights reform proposed (Read 9767 times) previous topic - next topic
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Belgian copyrights reform proposed

Reply #25 –
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The thing is, you can get a copy now for 0.5-1 Euro. Who cares that it's illegal? Nobody does, that's the point. The proposal makes illegal copying less attractive because copied CD's are more expensive and legal ones less.

Yeah, but it's completely artificial.. and made up !

<stupid comparisons>

I mean, why don't they:
- tax guns and give the money to the families of killed people
- tax weapons, to compensate the families of war victims
- tax knives and the like, for similar reasons ?
- tax chainsaws, to help growing new trees ?
- tax discos, to finance hearing healthcare ?

</stupid comparisons>

Let's tax everything, after all !
At the end you get taxes everywhere, and no change (because you receive tax money too !!!)...  but unfortunately, as soon as you want to behave unlike average people, you cannot because of the taxes !

Belgian copyrights reform proposed

Reply #26 –
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It won't work for the record companies (or artists).
Because you don't have to burn CD's to listen to the downloaded audio/video.  Just load it into your computer, portable or use MP3 disks (100 songs or so on 1 CD-R).


This is why tax on HD's, Mp3 players and 'other storage media' is also increased.

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Also the files will downloadable in other parts of the world where CD-R are cheap.


Yup. But it's still illegal to download them there.

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This political party is just trying to make itself popular with the youngsters I guess.


I suspect this as well. Nevertheless, it makes quite a bit of sense when you think about it, much more so than I thought at first.

Edit: On an offtopic note, there are parties here that try to make themselves popular here by advocating we throw all Turks and Arabs out because 'it will solve all our problems'. Given the choice, I'll take the free music advertisement

Belgian copyrights reform proposed

Reply #27 –
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Let's tax everything, after all !
At the end you get taxes everywhere, and no change (because you receive tax money too !!!)...  but unfortunately, as soon as you want to behave unlike average people, you cannot because of the taxes !

This is already the case in Belgium, so what's your point?

Belgian copyrights reform proposed

Reply #28 –
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I suspect this as well. Nevertheless, it makes quite a bit of sense when you think about it, much more so than I thought at first.

At least it's a bit innovative... to say the least 

Belgian copyrights reform proposed

Reply #29 –
Great idea. But I doubt it will ever happen.
Even combined with SP.A Sprit won't have the power to press this through.
We can only hope...

Belgian copyrights reform proposed

Reply #30 –
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A major political party in Belgium just launched a proposal to reform copyright law. It's...well...just read ahead:

[...]


Apart from the 2€ tax on CD-Rs, I quite like the sound of that. Certainly much better than what's going to happen here in Germany...

IMHO it could still be more simple though. I'm no expert, I have no clue about all the "numbers", but it seems logical to me that this would solve many of the existing problems:

- Reduce the price of CDs.
- Get rid of copy protections and make personal copies legal.
- Offer tracks for download via the internet in fairly good quality and at a reasonable price. (Not just complete albums, also individual tracks, so kiddies listening to charts on the radio all day can get what they want.) They could charge, say, 0.70€ per track for a 160kbps MP3 (or Vorbis), and 0.90€ for a track in lossless format.

That wouldn't kill off file sharing, but I don't see how that could make the situation any worse for the record labels either. (OK, the bit about downloading is too wunderful to ever be true, but it's still a good approach to resolve the situation IMHO.)

A lot of my music is borrowed from friends or the library (and then copied). For example, all but one of my Pink Floyd albums are copies because I can't afford to buy the ridiculously priced originals (14€ if you're lucky, and sometimes as much as 30€ for double CDs). If the CDs weren't that expensive, I would have bought many of the originals by now, and whoopie, the music industry would have got some money even out of a "poor school kid"  like me.

That's what sounds logical to me, dunno what you guys think. I'd be interested to know.

Belgian copyrights reform proposed

Reply #31 –
It gets on my wick this kind of tax-support-ripoff-musiclabels.

I have one rule for wether the music industry is a rip off - that is, buy a DVD movie, then compare the price of that with a soundtrack of the same movie, often you would pay twice as much!, where really it should be half as much, so the music industry is 4x overcharging...

They cry music theft, when it is really their prices that is driving the masses to theft - if they had competetive prices there would be no need for protected CDs, Joe Public would rather go onto a music labels site to download the music if it was uncrippled, they other choice is spyware-poor-quality world of Kazza, or such.

Belgian copyrights reform proposed

Reply #32 –
A luck I live near the german border. I will buy CD-Rs there if that 2€ per CDR gets thru. Then I'll prolly have to watch out for the douane (= border control that checks for duties), coz I'd be smuggling then by theory.

Belgian copyrights reform proposed

Reply #33 –
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They could charge, say, 0.70€ per track for a 160kbps MP3 (or Vorbis), and 0.90€ for a track in lossless format.

0.90€ for a lossless file?!
Nooooooooo!!!. It should depend on the song and album, 'cos what 'bout if ye buy the tracks and they end up costin' even more than the CD?  Think on some CDs like a Elvis' recopilation with 30 songs I saw out there!. Won't be the price a "little" overkill?

I prefer:

Free preview@Vorbis q1
Variable price (0'30€-0'75€ depending on song and album) for lossless files. This requires also the "CUE SHIT" <-----  with it, ISRC codes included so we can make our CD.

Belgian copyrights reform proposed

Reply #34 –
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It should depend on the song and album, 'cos what 'bout if ye buy the tracks and they end up costin' even more than the CD?


That's a risk one would have to take. If you want a complete album, you can go out and buy the CD. If you want just some tracks (for whatever reason), this method would be a lot better and cheaper.

Of course, I would also prefer something like "0.70€ per MP3 file, or 5€ per complete album / 0.90€ per lossless file, or 7€ per complete album", but that's certainly too good for them to ever adopt it.


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Free preview@Vorbis q1

Variable price (0'30€-0'75€ depending on song and album) for lossless files.


Nah. They have to gain something from a concept like this, and free previews at a quality which some people *cough* consider transparent (huh, MadiZone? ) and which is already better than the 128kbps Xing crap that is shared in Kazaa & Co. will mean just the opposite, as well as dumping prices.

Belgian copyrights reform proposed

Reply #35 –
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That's a risk one would have to take. If you want a complete album, you can go out and buy the CD. If you want just some tracks (for whatever reason), this method would be a lot better and cheaper.

Some CDs cannot be found on any store, like some game sountrack CDs...

Quote
Nah. They have to gain something from a concept like this, and free previews at a quality which some people *cough* consider transparent (huh, MadiZone? ) and which is already better than the 128kbps Xing crap that is shared in Kazaa & Co. will mean just the opposite, as well as dumping prices.


What 'bout mp3@32kaps*? 

kaps= kiloartifacts/sec

Belgian copyrights reform proposed

Reply #36 –
I suppose they will then add tax for paying victims of software piracy -  for example, every time when you buy a hard drive - Microsoft should get at least $10..

Or, tax the internet connection - statistics say that a lot of bandwidth is for Warez/DivX/MP3 content.. so, let's just tax the internet bandwidth (hmm..  I would come up with $20 per gigabyte of downloaded content)..  It would be a nice ide to perform "recursive taxing" - tax ISPs and users.

Belgian copyrights reform proposed

Reply #37 –
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I suppose they will then add tax for paying victims of software piracy -  for example, every time when you buy a hard drive - Microsoft should get at least $10..

Or, tax the internet connection - statistics say that a lot of bandwidth is for Warez/DivX/MP3 content.. so, let's just tax the internet bandwidth (hmm.. I would come up with $20 per gigabyte of downloaded content).. It would be a nice ide to perform "recursive taxing" - tax ISPs and users.

[NOSENSE]

And what about taxing the telephone lines? They can be phreaked! 
Or maybe also a tax to Microsoft for price abuse&monopoly corruption? Not, that ain't giving money to the govs...so let's tax the cables, they can be used to make a short-circuit on a nuclear reactor!!
And - I forgot!!- a big tax on monitors, 'coz they can be showin' "adult" content!!!!

[/NOSENSE]

Belgian copyrights reform proposed

Reply #38 –
The Belgian reform is not too bad.
Anyway i think that copyright mantainers (GEMA [de], SIAE [ita], SACEM [fra], etc..) sould be forced to recognize and respect some kinds of free licenses (OAL for example).
Italian SIAE accept free licenses for the software (that means you don't need their mark to sell your program) but not for audio.
Here you must pay a "multimedia license" if you put downloadable audio or video from your website even if the music is yours !!!
This is not acceptable !

I think that EU artists should have an uniform (and more liberal) copyright law.

Why don't we put together some proposals for the EU commission ?
(and we can also collect signs for the approval)

Volunteer needed...

Belgian copyrights reform proposed

Reply #39 –
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Some CDs cannot be found on any store, like some game sountrack CDs...

Game soundtracks are not distributed by any of the major record labels (at least I haven't seen anything the like, yet), they're not the problem of the music industry.

Belgian copyrights reform proposed

Reply #40 –
Quote
Quote
Some CDs cannot be found on any store, like some game sountrack CDs...

Game soundtracks are not distributed by any of the major record labels (at least I haven't seen anything the like, yet), they're not the problem of the music industry.

I have already seen some (WarCraft III, Dark Age of Camelot, Final Fantasy...), but I don't know which labels they were distributed by...

Belgian copyrights reform proposed

Reply #41 –
idea seems nice to my local garage band, still if i for example dont like their music and at the same time iam a creative person making lots of renders/pictures/animations that needs to be stored somehow and i know ill be paying for their trash music with emtpy cd purchase - it is pretty unfair really. (the whole situation seems like a gordian knot)

anyway, there was a dat debate going on some time ago, iam sure there are still those dat tape 'backup' recorders available to buy somewhere and somehow, what iam saying is that 'nature will find a way' 
PANIC: CPU 1: Cache Error (unrecoverable - dcache data) Eframe = 0x90000000208cf3b8
NOTICE - cpu 0 didn't dump TLB, may be hung

Belgian copyrights reform proposed

Reply #42 –
Quote
Quote

Game soundtracks are not distributed by any of the major record labels (at least I haven't seen anything the like, yet), they're not the problem of the music industry.

I have already seen some (WarCraft III, Dark Age of Camelot, Final Fantasy...), but I don't know which labels they were distributed by...

Uhm, you're right...

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005UNCC/

Distributed by Universal! Oops...

Belgian copyrights reform proposed

Reply #43 –
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1) It is allowed to offer copyrighted works for download on the internet.
2) Downloading and copying of music will be allowed.

first point is also meant for software? well anyway, but I don't see any benefits of downloading copyrighted software(not talking about music) for free? I mean, we all know what MS did with Windows XP, .NET Server, Office XP etc. ... you can get your software but you need to pay anyway in order to use the product... either you need to pay monthly or you buy your license once and you can use your software as long as you want to...

Belgian copyrights reform proposed

Reply #44 –
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Of course, I would also prefer something like "0.70€ per MP3 file, or 5€ per complete album / 0.90€ per lossless file, or 7€ per complete album", but that's certainly too good for them to ever adopt it.

Well never say never.
The Spanish site WebListen has legal status for now. They have an agreement with the Spanish "Copyrights control organisation" which seems to be enough for the moment.

You can download a song for about $/€ 0.75, but there are several other offers like a weekend for 9.-  or a fee per month.
As expected it's only mainstream music 

And oh, you can choose between mp3 (128k) and WMA (64k), no lossless. 
--
Ge Someone
[span style='font-size:7pt;line-height:100%'] edit: fixed the quote[/span]
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

Belgian copyrights reform proposed

Reply #45 –
Obviously, the 2 euro price of the media would not be warranted, because cd-r media has other legal uses besides using it for music.

edit:  And as I have read here before, a good proposal for the price on downloaded music should be by the length of the music, not strictly file by file.  One might say that he or she could then be charged loads for a long song that isn't worth it.  Ok, that would simply mean that it was a bad choice of music by the purchaser, because if he or she liked it, he or she would enjoy the length of it
WARNING:  Changing of advanced parameters might degrade sound quality.  Modify them only if you are expirienced in audio compression!
 

Belgian copyrights reform proposed

Reply #46 –
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Obviously, the 2 euro price of the media would not be warranted, because cd-r media has other legal uses besides using it for music.

This debate has already been lost. In Belgium, and I think several other European countries, you already pay copyright taxes on CD-R media.