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Canadians love stealing music and would like to continue
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 18 March 2009
Following remarks made by the boss of the International Federation Of The Phonographic Industry, John Kennedy, at the Canadian Music Week conference last weekend – to the effect that Canadian politicians are not taking online piracy seriously enough and that that is destroying the country’s music industry – we have stats today that suggest no one in Canada, outside the record label and artist community presumably, is taking the P2P phenomenon all that seriously.
Or, rather, they don’t believe there’s anything intrinsically wrong with downloading music without the content owner’s permission. The stats come from a survey conducted by Angus Reid Strategies and published at the end of Canadian Music Week. They say that 45% of Canadians believe that using P2P services to download music and movies for free is “doing what people should be able to do on the internet”. Which is some pretty weird wording, but basically it means nearly half of the country think they should have the right to access any content online for free if and when they choose to.
Not only that, but the survey also says that only 3% of Canadians feel that filesharing is a criminal act that should be punishable under the law. Of course, according to some Canadian judges, under the country’s existing copyright laws filesharing isn’t a criminal act that is punishable under the law, but the music industry is busy lobbying political types to change the law so it is. Given public opinion – according to this survey – it’s perhaps unsurprising the political types are procrastinating in doing so.
That said, 23% of respondents in the survey said that they had downloaded files from P2P services in the last month, and 12% had used legal services – both of which are low figures, suggesting large numbers of Canadians, or at least a large portion of those surveyed, aren’t accessing any digital music, legal or otherwise, which possibly skewed the results a little. Certainly it would explain why 73% are against the idea of internet service providers charging a levy to compensate content owners who lose out to piracy.
