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No Levy on iPods in Canada

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the business-as-usual dept.

colinemckay writes "The fight over a levy on iPods and other digital music devices 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."

2 of 236 comments (clear)

  1. Apple "Fairplay" is less open than Microsoft DRM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Let me first state that I am against DRM as much as the next guy .. But I wish to compare Apples to Microsofts here ...

    Nobody can sell music DRM'd music that plays on the ipod. Yes, they can sell mp3's but these aren't protected. Yes I know DRM is crackable blah blah .. but the whole thing helps Apple keep it's monopoly position without worrying about iPod clones (competing mp3 players arent legally allowed to play protected songs bought off iTunes). Also, if you wish to sell music online ..unless you are prepared to make it mp3 and have no DRM .. you have to sell it through iTunes .. and they will take a chunk of the profit and/or tell you what to charge subject to whether they'll accept the song even.

    With Microsoft DRM .. anybody can add DRM to their song and sell it on the net (without having to use itunes as the middle man and give Apple a chunk of change). You can protect your music and sell it online on your own website or elsewhere.

    I'm not saying M$FT did this out of goodness etc. They basically had no choice.

    Anyway ..dunno the point of making this point that others have been trying to make for a while .. cause people who hate DRM will mod me down, and Apple folks will mod me down too.

    If they wanted to just sell mp3s, how come many indy and local bands don't put their music up for sale online?

  2. IRiver and XClef vs iPod by nickrooster · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    I find that, for the money, the iRiver is a much better player and has many more features. I have an iHP-140, and the things it has built-in that a standard 40GB iPod does not have are: A) Vorbis support - the best (in my audiophile and freedom-loving opinion) lossy format! http://vorbis.com/ MP3s distort the high and low end a *lot*. Makes songs sound awful. But everyone loves .mp3 for some reason... weird. B) FM tuner - Not that I *listen* to the radio C) Built in recording support as either .wav or .mp3 - and the ability to use an external mike. D) Shows up as a USB Mass-storage device on every operating system - so you don't need any crappy proprietary software to get access to *your* data! Besides, you have music players and jukeboxes on your machine already, right? E) Long battery life - mine lasts 13 - 16 hours playing 256K vorbis files, after owning it for more than a year. F?) Not sure if iPod has this, but optical output as well as analog. Awesome sound quality. G) Other codec support - .wav, .wma, .ogg, .mp3. Check it out if you are thinking of buying a music player - http://www.iriveramerica.com/ Also check out the XClef, who's main feature is that it has a *lot* of storage space. The largest I have seen was 100GB. Disadvantage is that it is shaped like 1/2 of a brick. http://xclef.com/pro03_e.htm This is the up to, apparently, 137GB model. -Nick