No I-Pod Levy
The fight over a levy on IPods and other digital music players ended Thursday when the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear any further arguments on the matter.
That means there will be no levy applied to digital audio recorders such as Apple’s popular IPod and IPod Shuffle as well as other MP3 players like IRiver.
The non-profit agency had been collecting the tariff - $2 for non-removable memory capacity of up to one GB, $15 for one to 10 GBs, $25 for more than 10 GB - since December 2003 through a tax built into the price of the devices.
It stopped in December 2004 when the Federal Court overturned the policy at the urging of the Canadian Coalition for Fair Digital Access, a group which represents retailers and manufacturers such as Future Shop, Wal-Mart Canada, Apple Canada, Sony Canada, and Dell Computer Corporation of Canada.
canadian press
Legally this is not terribly surprising. However, from the perspective of trying to balance the rights of content creators with those of consumers this is a bit disappointing.
I have been arguing in favour of a levy to recognize the reality of downloading. Let’s face it, there are lots of people just like Darren Barefoot “I downloaded it” who do not “fully intend to give them the money” (a promise which from Darren I’d believe). A small levy on digital media would go some distance to making sure artists received compensation while avoiding the silliness of the RIAA suing its own customers.
Written by jay on July 29th, 2005 with
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