Private Copying Levy Debate Heats Up

On Thursday, Michael Geist appeared before the Heritage Committee to testify on a range of digital issues, including the motion and private bill to extend the private copying levy to "audio recording devices". This spurred quite an interesting debate in the HoC on the topic on Friday.
Mrs. Lavallée of the Bloc Québecois claimed:

Unlike what the Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages claims, this has nothing to do with BlackBerrys, laptops or iPhones. The minister is using scare tactics. We are talking about MP3 players, and the most well-known brand is the iPod.

The bill proposes to extend the levy to include audio recording devices, extending the levy already placed on audio recording media. To determine whether any particular medium qualifies for the levy, the Copyright Board must determine if the medium is "ordinarily used by individual consumers for copying sound recordings". It does not matter if the medium is chiefly, mainly, or typically used for that purpose; it only matters if the use is considered "ordinary".


My BlackBerry comes with a set of earbuds that includes a microphone and a button for pausing the current song to answer a phone call. There are dedicated play/pause and skip track buttons on the top. The menu allows me to navigate and play all my videos and songs directly on the device.


It doesn't matter that the main purpose of the BlackBerry is to answer phone calls, check email, or surf the web. It is "ordinarily used" to listen to music that I have to copy on there from somewhere else. The levy or "iTax" would clearly apply. Mr. del Mastro is correct to claim that this bill seeks to separate MP3 players from BlackBerries, while these and other devices continue to converge in the real world. It's yesterday's battle, tomorrow!
Mrs. Lavallée went on:

A nation-wide poll conducted in June 2006 by Environics Research Group confirmed that ... 79% of Canadians who make private copies stated that a $40 levy on iPods—which is a lot—or other 30GB digital audio recorder would be fair and reasonable. We should remember that a 30GB iPod costs several hundred dollars and that a $40 levy on an iPod has never been considered. What had been suggested previously was an amount between $2 and $25.

I have a really hard time believing that many people would think a $40 iTax would be appropriate. I would really like to see who the sample population was in that study. Something tells me that "Canadians who make private copies" doesn't quite define the group properly.


Also, her credibility is severely impaired by claiming that $40 has never been considered. In fact, in 2007 the Copyright Board's proposed tariff on audio recording devices was as high as $75 for a device with more than 30GB of memory. It may not have been approved, but it was certainly "considered" enough to be included in the official proposed tariff by the government's own Copyright Board.


-- UPDATE: A 32GB microSD card, used by many MP3/Media players for storage (and so = a "audio recording device"), can be bought off the shelf for $87.77 at my local PCCyber. Alert the presses! "Several hundred dollars" has been redefined to mean "less than one hundred dollars". Also, the amount of the levy does not vary with the retail price of the medium. This approach has been explicitly ruled out by the Copyright Board. So, as that $87.77 chip trends down to $20, that $40-$75 levy will stay quite constant.


Need proof? The levy on CDs has remained unchanged at about $0.29 per disc, even as the retail price per disc has trended down to as low as $0.24 per disc - LOWER than the tariff alone!