Julianna Yau’s blog

There are now reports that there will not be a levy for mp3 players:

• iPod Levy - Copyright Board decision quahsed by Federal Court of Appeal
• Federal Court of Appeal Kills iPod Levy
• Appeal Court rejects iPod levy

Geist indicates that “it also means that Canadians who copy music from their CDs to their iPods are not covered by the exception and thus arguably infringe copyright.” Perhaps I’m being blokeish, but I really don’t understand how that is the case because the Copyright Act currently includes a provision allowing copying for private use to not be infringement. I don’t understand how a tariff can be imposed on a legislated right. Although I am strongly against unauthorized distribution of a creator’s work, the mp3-player levy has been positioned as something to address private copy, not p2p sharing of music or other activities… at least, that’s what it seems like in the rather ambiguous presentation of the levy.

What also concerns me is the absence of any mention of the removable electronic memory cards in the Secure Digital, MultiMedia, and Memory Stick formats with more than 256 MBs of memory, etc which were part of the proposal. Is the tariff on those items a go or a no-go? As an artist (who recently purchased a new digital camera!), a tariff on digital media is extremely concerning to me because of the variety of uses of media. I use SD cards to store the photos of my own sculptures which I have taken, and USB drives and CDs to store my own files for business uses. Although I recognize that not everyone is as mindful of copyright as I am, I also find it very difficult to believe that, with the current prices and variety of mp3-players, many people are using anything but an mp3-player to store their songs (whether obtained legitimately or not).

Here is the letter I wrote in response to the Private Copying Tariff, sans address, for anyone who is interested in my original response/analysis of the proposal. Comments/critiques/etc are welcome…just keep it civil.

Update, later on Jan 11, 2008: Seems like I was being a bloke. Geist sent me a message on Facebook to point out that if I were to read the Private Copy section of the Copyright Act more carefully, I would have noticed that it applies to personal copies onto an “audio recording medium”… and the Federal Court of Appeal ruled that an mp3-player is not an audio recording medium. Damn.

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