Goodbye iPod tax
p2pnet news | Freedom:- Canada’s Federal Court of Appeal ("FCA") quashed the Copyright Board’s July 19, 2007m decision to go ahead with its planned hearing to certify a levy of up to $75 on iPods and other Digital Audio Recorders, posted Ottawa copyright lawyer Howard Knopf, last week, going on:
"It took the Court less than 24 hours to render its decision – which told the Board that the Court’s previous decision on the same issue from 2004 is ‘dispositive’."
Now, it’s not hard to understand why the court’s action was so quick and vicious, says a National Post OpEd, going on in 2004, "the same court tackled the complicated issue of whether the Copyright Board had the statutory power to impose taxes on iPod-type devices, with their embedded memory, in the same way it does with removable blank media like CD-ROMs."
It seemed absurd, "to allow the Copyright Board to introduce a levy on ‘removable’ media, but to block its right to introduce levies on ‘devices’ that are essentially nothing but the same storage media with a built-in user interface,’ says the item, adding:
But to the 2004 panel it seemed even more absurd to give the Copyright Board an unlimited license to tax all devices containing digital memory; on such a principle, the court noted, the board could go after manufacturers of PDAs, digital cameras, telephones or even heart-rate monitors. The court thus told the Copyright Board, in no uncertain terms, that it had to observe the distinction between "devices" and "media" and keep its hands off of iPods and the rest of the species. It is confusing that the board forgot this in 2007 and allowed its legal instrument, the Canadian Private Copying Collective, to go ahead with another attempt at exactly the same type of levy. It almost appears to be an act of civil disobedience — and a deliberate waste of the Federal Court of Appeal’s time — by a poorly managed agency that is a little too convinced of its own rectitude.That is not to say that the new ruling is unambivalent good news for the consumer. We may all be thrilled to keep an extra $75 in our pockets the next time we buy a portable music player, but the levy would at least have had the benefit of assuring us a clear paid-up right to copy the music we own onto those players. As things stand, we users of iPods and the like are all, arguably, "copyright infringers" –even those of us who have been pious enough only to copy music that we bought legitimately on older media. It is for Parliament to resolve this technological quandary, preferably by explicit recognition of the reality that once you’ve bought a song, you should be able to take it with you to new platforms.
On the other hand, it is not likely to be long before most of the music sold by retail consists of digital files in MP3 format, or some other format anyhow. At that point, the Copyright Board’s pre-sumption that all purchasers of media players intend to commit "infringement" will no longer be valid, if it ever was.
Also See:-
$75 on iPods – iPod levy: Copyright Board decision quasheds, January 11, 2008
National Post – Striking down the iPod tax, January 14, 2008
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January 15th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
All levies on hardware should be banned!!