Copyfighting Canadian lawyer Michael Geist has a hell of an article up on First Monday where he dissect the funny arithmetic the music industry has used to justify its calls for restrictive new Canadian copyright laws to "save Canadian aritsts." This kind of incisive analysis cuts straight through the music-industry BS — it's a breath of fresh air that is sorely needed.
Although royalty rates vary between artists, the consensus estimate is that the combined royalties earned by both the performer and the songwriter stand at approximately 12 percent. In fact, Sanderson Taylor, a leading Canadian music law firm, maintains that the actual royalty earned by the artists is typically even lower, since the producer's royalty is taken from the artists' compensation and many contracts do not provide for a full royalty for CD sales [21].
Assuming artists receive the full 12 percent royalty, the annual royalty loss attributable to music downloading in Canada is about C$655,000 (12 percent of C$5.5 million). For those that claim that the full industry loss should be counted, the annual lost royalty for Canadian artists stands at C$2 million…
Given the tens of millions of dollars that the Canadian government spends annually to support the creation of Canadian music [23], it is apparent that the relative impact of lost royalties due to file–sharing pales by comparison.
(via /.)
