Canadian iPod Tax Shot Down
The Canadian Federal Court of Appeals drop-kicked a proposed “iPod Tax” on digital music players, and storage devices recently. The planned levies were going to charge Canadians CAN$75 for digital media players with 30GB or more of storage and around CAN$5 for Flash memory between 1GB and 4GB. The insanity was aimed at compensating creatives for piracy, but the tax was so out of line, that it was doomed from the get go.
However, the Copyright Board of Canada argued that more cash was needed, beyond the existing taxes on recordable media, due to rampant file-sharing and piracy. The “iPod Tax,” a name given to the proposed legislation by the media, was ultimately taken out back and shot because “the Copyright Board erred in law when it concluded that it has the legal authority to certify the tariff that the Canadian Private Copyright Collective has proposed for 2008 and 2009 on digital audio recorders,” according to the court. The ruling is similar to a decision made in 2004, which also crushed an attempt to tax “digital audio recorders.”
