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Canada's Copyright Cops Give Go-Ahead For iPod Tax
An anonymous reader writes "Michael Geist reports that the Canada's Copyright Board has given the go-ahead for a new copyright tax on iPods, despite an earlier court decision blocking the fee. The Board apparently ruled that not including iPods would make criminals of millions of Canadians and that the levy could conceivably be applied to cellphones and personal computers. 'If we're going to make P2P legal through a levy system, the system must (1) address both downloading and uploading; (2) consider addressing non-commercial use of content; (3) cover audio and video; and (4) more closely link the copying to those paying the levy. The government has yet to play its hand on this issue, but with the prospect of an unpopular levy and mounting pressure for a Canadian fair use provision, it will have to take a stand sometime soon.'"
Why try and explain something that's not true? Unfortunately, you got the concept backwards. We pay a levy on blank media because it's legal to copy audio to that media for personal use. Canadians have been in the clear downloading things off of P2P for years (apart from the minor snag of needing to make the copy to an approved, levied, media). It's funny how many people complain about standard copyright law being broken in an age of infinite supply, but then refuse to acknowledge an attempt to bring the laws up to date. I don't like the levy the way it's implemented, but the lawmakers were thinking straight when they decided to make an activity performed by a large part of the population (copying audio recordings without permission) legal, and finding new ways to compensate creators where copyright had broken down.