[686] Of levy on CD-R

I had wanted to blog about the Music Council of Malaysia’s call for a levy on blank CD-R earlier. For some reason however, it slipped off my mind. Thanks to an article in The Star today, it came back to me. I think, if you’ve been reading enough of my stuff, you know what I’ve to say. For those that don’t, I’m don’t share the same table with the Music Council.

The Music Council, according to an article in The Star, states that:

…it had asked for the levy because it is concerned over the loss in revenue to the music industry whenever customers make copies of music CDs (see In.Tech, Dec 8). It believes that two out of three CD-Rs sold in the country are used for copying audio-visual material.

The Recording Industry Association of Malaysia claimed that such ‘home recordings’ are a serious problem for the industry.

The nature of the issue is almost similar to protectionism. Yet, this case isn’t quite about competition because the music and CD-R aren’t very comparable. But the bottomline is, an industry is trying to make their product relatively more competitive to some other good not by increasing the quality of their good but instead by forcing the other good’s cost to go up. In the end, it’s nothing more than an interest group with protectionism in mind.

Earlier, Malaysian telcos dealers and distributors have requested the certain Malaysian authority to restrict competition because competition hurts their profit.

By saying that I disagree with the levy, I’m not saying I accept piracy. Duplicating copyrighted media without permission, as much as I hate to admit it, is plain stealing. Still, accussing everybody that uses CD-R is involved in piracy is unfair. Imposing blanket levy is even more unfair.

What the music industry needs is a stronger anti-piracy enforcement, not protectionism. In fact, I’d rather see stakeholders in the music industry to initiate legal actions against those involved in piracy, like what the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been doing against illegal file sharers for the past few years in the US. Legal actions won’t introduce market frictions, unlike levying. At least in the long term.

p/s – for the whole morning, I couldn’t access my own site. I couldn’t access a few other sites like Screenshots either.

pp/s – turned out it wasn’t just me. There was a network outage near Putrajaya yesterday. (via)