Canadian MP3 Player Levy

I found out about the new Canadian levy on MP3 players today, which is a big fat drag. As Shannon explains:

Last week, the Copyright Board of Canada imposed a new copyright levy on MP3 players. This is in addition to surcharges that Canadians also pay on recordable media such as CD-Rs, cassettes, and Minidiscs (CBC has a nice summary of the existing and proposed increases). On the bright side, the Copyright Board of Canada decided against increasing the levies on these media, and also decided against imposing new surcharges on DVDs, memory cards and other removable storage media. And the fees on MP3 players were much lower than they might have been.

The original plan would have added $21/gigabyte of storage to the cost of audio players with permanent memory. That would have added $840 CDN to the cost of a 40G iPod. Instead, they went with a straight $25 CDN fee on players with 10G or more of storage, which is nearly small enough to shrug off.

On the subject of that I just got a 128 meg Creative Muvo the other day for $99 Canadian which I guess was unaffected by said annoying levy.