NDP MP Charlie Angus, a former musician in the punk rock band L’Étranger with Andrew Cash, and later in the more folk-oriented Grievous Angels, has formally introduced a bill meant to ease the legal uncertainty around format shifting, Nate Anderson writes in Arts Technica today. He proposes a trade: Canada’s levy on items like blank CDs gets expanded to devices like iPods, and in return people can legally transfer their own music to devices like iPods.
Back in 2004, federal appellate judge Konrad von Finckenstein (now Canada’s top telecoms regulator) ruled that “the downloading of a song for a person’s private use does not constitute infringement.” He cited a section of Canada’s copyright law which says that copies of musical works downloaded “onto an audio recording medium for the private use of the person who makes the copy does not constitute an infringement of the copyright in the musical work, the performer’s performance or the sound recording.”
But what’s a “medium”? – Full story here.
Windsor Star by Sarah Schmidt – Tories reject expanding storage levy: On Tuesday, after the NDP’s digital affairs critic introduced a private member’s bill in the House of Commons to tweak the law to allow the levy to be extended to current generation of copying devices, Industry Minister Tony Clement shot down the idea as a “tax on iPods.”
