From the Canadian Press, Top court refuses to hear appeal on MP3 players

The fight over a levy on iPods and other digital music players ended today when the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear any further arguments on the matter.

That means there will be no levy applied to digital audio recorders such as Apple’s popular iPod and iPod Shuffle as well as other MP3 players like iRiver.

“Obviously we’re disappointed. We felt it was self-evident that those products are sold for the purpose of copying music,” said David Basskin, of the Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC), the non-profit agency which collects tariffs on behalf of musicians and record companies.

This was a pretty questionable approach even back in 1999, when the Private Copying Tariff (a levy on recordable media like audio cassettes, recordable CDs and MiniDiscs) was first introduced. It casts a very wide net, tacitly assuming that if you’re buying recordable media, you intend to use it to copy music that you don’t own. (Or, technically, music you don’t own a license to. Welcome to the fun world of intellectual property law.)

If you can prove you have a legitimate use for the media, recognized by legislation — say, if you’re a telemarketer (yes, really) — then you can apply for an exemption. (A few organizations, those working with the perceptually disabled, are exempt right off the bat.)

It was a point of view that might have been arguable in the 1970s and 1980s. But these days, I buy CD-Rs and DVD-Rs to back up data… my data, thank you very much.

A growing number of people are using these media, not to copy Celine Dion CDs, but to record their own creations and transfer pictures and videos of their kids to Grandma’s computer or DVD player. iPods and other MP3 players increasingly hold music files purchased from sites like iTunes, or podcasts generated for free distribution.

Taxing one group of creators to fund another is starting to look pretty dumb. The CPCC’s levy, never well-targeted to begin with, is capturing more and more people whose activities can’t remotely be claimed to impinge on the recording industry, songwriters and performers the organization funds.

Although they rejected its application to MP3 players, the Supreme Court refused to examine the levy’s broader validity. That’s something the federal Department of Heritage is promising for the fall.

Updated: Michael Geist has, of course, read the decision rather than just the news coverage (insert sheepish expression here), and he’s a lot more pessimistic.

Simply put, copying store bought CDs onto iPods, as CRIA’s own Graham Henderson has supported, may now be unlawful in Canada since it is difficult to find an exception within the Copyright Act that would permit that form of copying.