Fair Copyright for Canada’s Facebook group continues to grow in numbers.

I don’t want free music, I just don’t want to have to keep paying for the same music over and over and over again.

I have literally hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars of music on my computer purchased absolutely legally through iTunes. If this law passes, I’ll either need to use an Apple music player (and nothing but an Apple music player) for the rest of my life, or re-purchase every song I’ve ever bought from iTunes so that I can play it on my new non-Apple player. Having a format-shifting exception is nothing but cheap window dressing if you make it illegal to circumvent the DRM technology that prevents you from format shifting. So now I’m a slave to Apple, because my government wants to make it illegal for me to modify the music I purchased on iTunes so that it will play on a Microsoft player. Now, it’s Apple’s right to make it hard for me to play the music I bought from them on other companies’ products, but I question where the societal need is for the government to back up their move by making it illegal for me to do anything about it.

If GM wants to build a car with a special device that only allows it to take gas from gas stations approved by GM they’re free to do so. But by what logic would my government make it illegal for me to remove that device from a GM car I bought and paid for? That’s not protecting “artists” or “creators” or “intellectual property”, it’s protecting corporate profits. Would Sloan LIKE me to purchase a second digital copy of their latest album so I can get a copy that I can play on a Zune? Sure. But does anyone think that they think I should be FORCED to buy the album again? When it would be easy as pie to fix the copy I already have to work on another player? As it is I can’t listen to most of my music collection on the Windows Media player, or through the Windows Media Centre on my PC. Why should it be illegal for me to fix that?

Sadly, I was naive enough to think that no government would ever help a giant multinational to enforce an artificial monopoly by preventing consumers from choosing what type of device they want to listen to their legally purchased music on, so now I’m stuck with Apple (again, unless I re-purchase most of my music collection from another DRM-free provider). I’m sure there are some people out there who, if the time comes that they abandon their Apple iPod, will just risk the $20,000 fine to make their music playable on whatever the next great MP3 player is. If you’ve got more than about 2,000 CDs (and I know people who do) it’s cheaper to just pay the fine than to repurchase your entire music collection for the umpteenth time so you can free yourself from Apple’s clutches.