What happened to the massive levies proposed for MP3 players?
For 2003-2004, the CPCC initially proposed very high levies ($21 per gigabyte) for devices like the Apple iPod or the Creative Nomad Jukebox. These proposed rates were published in the Canada Gazette on Saturday, March 9, 2002. A PDF of the Canada Gazette notice is available on the Copyright Board website and is called the Private Copying Tariff, 2003-2004. For example, the Apple iPod has a 40 gigabyte hard drive and sells for $754 CDN. The proposed levy on it would have been $840. In a later filing to the Copyright Board, the CPCC modified many of their proposed rates, introduced a complex sliding scale for the rates applied to MP3 players. On the revised scale, the levy on a 40 gigabtye iPod would have been about $150, still a substantial amount. (Click here to see a table of the revised levies.) (Link and table added 2003-12-16) In its December 12, 2003 ruling, the Copyright Board set the levy rates for “non-removable memory permanently embedded in a digital audio recorder, $2 for e
