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Tuesday 13th February 2007
Canadian rights bodies call for 'iPod' levy to be reinstated 10:38AM, Tuesday 13th February 2007
The organisation that collects royalties for music recordings in Canada has renewed its campaign for a levy on portable music players such as ipods to 'compensate' rights holders for revenues it claims have been lost to private copying.

The Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC) wants staggered levies, ranging from CA$5 on players with up to 1MB of storage to CA$75 on those with more then 30MB, despite losing a 2005 court case which ruled that such levies are illegal.

Canada's Copyright Board has long levied a small charge on blank media under the terms of the country's Copyright Act, and in 2003
 
 
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extended it to digital players. But in December 2004 Mr Justice Marc Noël of the Federal Court of Appeal ruled that the Act did not cover the flash memory or hard drives used to store music in portable devices.

However the CPCC says that the levy applied not to the storage media, but to portable devices themselves, and is therefore quite within the provisions of the Act.

'It is simply a matter of fairness that the creators of content, the creators of culture actually, should receive some compensation for the large volume of unauthorised and uncontrollable copying onto these media,' said Claudette Fortier, Chair of the CPCC Board of Directors. 'Private copying is a fact - Canadians do it. And legislators, in recognising this fact, chose to create the exception in the Copyright Act which allows individuals to make copies for personal use, in exchange for a levy on the blank audio recording media people ordinarily use to make these private copies.'

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