The Songwriters Association of Canada (SAC) have revealed a new proposal that would allow all Canadian citizens to download as much unauthorized music as they please for the low, flat-rate of $5 CAD per month.
The new proposal, which will require federal approval to pass, will add a $5 CAD surcharge to your monthly ISP bill but allow unlimited music downloading from sources of your choice.
“That’s a very reasonable amount of money to legally, without fear of any legal repercussions, to be able to download that and share it with [whomever] you want to and as many times as you want,” said Eddie Schwartz, president of the songwriters’ group. “On iTunes to download one album, it’s $10. This is half of that and this is pretty reasonable to have access to the entire repertoire of Western music.”
The organization plans to meet at Toronto’s Ryerson University to launch the proposal while asking for an immediate amendment to the Canadian Copyright Act. The new right will be called the Right to Equitable Reenumeration for Music File Sharing and would allow the songwriters to collect fees from all Internet subscribers.
The group went on to say that the new proposal would bring the SAC, and the songwriters, composers and lyricists behind it between $500 million and $900 million CAD per year.
Result for: surcharge
AT&T representative Michael Coe has said the company believes it is “inevitable” that heavy Internet users will eventually have to pay some sort of surcharge for the extra bandwidth demand placed on the network.
The ISP along with other providers have been seeing a huge surge in traffic for its DSL services, which can be attributed to a small group of users. Coe added that only 5 percent of customers are currently accounting for 46 percent of overall bandwidth used per month. These users may need to be charged extra.
Although DSL is switch-based unlike cable Internet access Coe says the highly disproportionate use is still affecting other users.
The new stance is similar to other ISPs, such as Rogers in Canada and Comcast in the States which has said it is considering using a 250GB softcap and charging overage fees for users who cross that bandwidth cap.
Critics complain however, that the caps would unfairly punish users who use tons of bandwidth legitimately to, for example, watch movies through Hulu or Netflix, download movies from iTunes or play online multiplayer gaming. The critics do have a point, not everyone is a BitTorrent user.
