This whole End of the World Party episode has got me thinking more about this stuff. Was the CD I bought actually defective?

Notice I said “CD”. I was under the impression I was buying a Compact Disc. It sure looked alot like a Compact Disc, and was displayed in a rack containing many Compact Discs. But, when I realized that it was copy-protected, I looked closely at the disc and the packaging. Nowhere on it does it say it is a Compact Disc. This is good for them. If it did, I would have much stronger case for saying it is defective. This product does not, in fact, comply with the published specifications of the Compact Disc standard. That is why it will not play in a DVD-ROM drive (nor, presumably, a CD-ROM drive.)

I am reminded of a story on Slashdot some time ago, about Phillips (one of the original creators of the Compact Disc specification) suing a record company to prevent them from calling their bastard product a Compact Disc. Good for them.

But not good enough to save me this hassle today. Should record companies be allowed to sell this product as if it were a Compact Disc? They did put a little “Copy-protected” blurb on the back, very small. Is that enough? It wasn’t enough to make me aware that I was buying a shiny $18 beer coaster. I thought it was a Compact Disc. Seems more than a little bit deceptive to me.

Not wanting to interrupt a good rant, I will continue with another thought that has returned to my mind. Here in Canada, a law was passed some years ago, which adds a $0.21 levy to the cost of blank CD-Rs. This money goes to the Canadian Private Copying Collective, who will, presumably, give some portion of it to Alanis Morisette and Bryan Adams. A similar law recently passed in Germany.

So, here’s the situation: you are guilty. You have been tried and convicted of stealing copyrighted music, and you have to pay a fine. There’s just one problem here… what if you’re really innocent?

Defenders of this law will claim that it’s all about averages. Some people use every blank CD-R they buy to copy music, some people (like me) use almost none of them. But what do I care? What does it have to do with me that some guy down the road has a library of 500 stolen CDs? What does it have to do with me that it’s almost impossible to find and prosecute the true copyright pirates? We have lots of unsolved crime. How many murders are unsolved every year? Shall we go out and arrest 5 or 6 random people for murder every year, just to balance out the average?

This has created a state of injustice in the world. Any good, right-thinking, freedom-loving person abhors injustice. Injustice must be corrected. Since you’ve already been convicted of this crime and been duly punished, it’s too late to fix the injustice at that end. The only way to correct the imbalance now is to actually steal some music. So, it is the moral duty of all justice-loving people in Canada to go out and steal some music. Only then will justice be restored.

How much to steal then? Lets see… assume an average cost for a legally purchased CD of about $18 (they cost around $1 to manufacture, by the way). At $0.21 per blank CD-R, that works out to 85.7 blank CD-Rs per CD. So, you are morally obligated to use one out of every 85 blank CD-Rs you buy to make a copy of a copyrighted CD.

I’m glossing over some details here, of course, like the fact that other people besides those represented by CPCC are entitled to a cut of your music-buying dollar, and they aren’t profiting from this injustice. But the point stands. Just make sure it’s an Alanis Morisette or Bryan Adams CD you copy, though, otherwise you’ll be creating more injustice.