It’s International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Really.
And to “celebrate,” I went looking for real-life pirates that had some connection to tax. Know where I found them? The music industry.
That’s right, modern-day “pirates” such as they are, have shed their pirate patches and parrots for grunge tee shirts and ripped jeans. More or less, our swashbucklers have been replaced by slackers. And, if you believe the RIAA, the weapon of choice of the modern day pirates – the computer – is killing off livelihoods of the rich, just as in the days of yore.
Before computers were as disposable as tissues and almost as cheap, musical pirates depended upon the audio cassette or music tape (kids, ask your parents to tell you what it is). You could easily make recordings off of the radio or another friend’s record album (kids, ask your grandparents to tell you what it is) using a tape recorder and a fairly cheap cassette tape. It was wildly popular, so much so that the “mixtape” became the prerequisite to a successful high school or college social scene.
Not surprisingly, the music industry wasn’t happy. If kids realized that they could “steal” music for free, why would they ever buy it? And so, quietly, without many musical pirates even aware, a pirate tax was levied on blank cassettes in the US.
As of 2003, the Canadians did have such a tax, levying a rate of 22 US cents (worth a whopping 22 Canadian cents now, eh) on each blank audiocassette (apparently still sold in Canada) and 59 US cents on each CD-R audio (I’m guessing you can do the math here) – only it’s called a levy. Additionally, there have been variations on a $25 “levy”/pirate tax on any hard disk in an MP3 player following the announcement that Canadians led the way in mp3 piracy across the globe. Canadian pirates, who would have thunk it?
Ultimately, there have been severe restrictions on these taxes/levies/tariffs in Canada – the most controversial being the repeal of a tax on MP3 players, lead by those stalwarts of Canadian tax reform, Apple and Dell.
In the US, we don’t have such a tax on blank CDs and MP3 players. But maybe we should (as has been previously suggested). Maybe a few cents tax on each recordable medium would put an end to all of this music piracy… just as it did in the 1970s and 1980s with that audiocassette tax. Wait, that didn’t work, did it? But the recording industry got a lot more money out of the deal, which is what they want ultimately now – it was, as has been pointed out time and again – never about the little guy/artist (and no, I’m not referring to Prince).
Or maybe they should just keep suing college kids.
That is really interesting, Kelly. Very cool. Thanks for the explanation.
Terrible idea. I download absolutely no music but I burn a big stack of CDs and DVDs every year as backups of my computer data. Not only that, I’m a musician in a working band and I burn demo CDs of our music. A ridiculous, unjust and inappropriate imposition of tax. In my opinion, as a musician, the RIAA is their own worst enemy. They should not be rewarded for this sort of nonsense.