"Taxing" Canadians' Patience & Pocketbooks
Found on Excess Copyright on Sunday, 15 May 2011
The CPCC collects "levies" on blank CDs and has desperately tried but failed twice in the Courts and recently with the Government and the Bill C-32 Committee to get an "iPod" tax.
It has now resurrected its efforts for a "levy" - or a "tax" as Ministers call it - on memory cards, such as Compact Flash.
At the time in 2003, the CPCC wanted "0.8c for each megabyte of memory in each removable electronic memory card, each removable flash memory storage medium of any type, or each removable micro-hard drive". On today's typical 16 GB card that sells for about $30 or less, that would be a "tax" of $128 - or about 400%.
They should tax paper too: I mean, you could print out mp3s in hex and give them to your friends who could use OCR on the scans.