Conservatives Vow To Shoot Down The Return of The iPod Tax

In a rare statement responding to a private members' bill, Canada's heritage minister James Moore has slammed the proposed law that would reinstate a levy on MP3 players introduced into parliament by NDP MP Charlie Angus.  The levy that was first implemented in 2003 but was struck down by the federal court of appeal a year and a half later.  There have been attempts to bring back the levy, this is the first time a bill has hit the floor of parliament that would bring back the levy on MP3 players. 

The Liberal/NDP approach of taxing anything that can contain or play music treats all Canadians like criminals and makes even law abiding Canadians who pay for the music they listen to pay fines for those who get their music from peer to peer networks who would be paying the same fines.  The conservative approach has been just as heavy handed nail in a stick, with two previous copyright bills that tried to implement a clone of the hugely unpopular Digital Millennium Copyright Act, entering Canada into the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which authorizes search and seizures without even so much as a court order to find potentially pirated music and movies.

The conservative approach may be unpopular but at least it trusts Canadians to do the right thing.  Which is a lot better than the approach of taxing every blank CD, DVD, MP3 player, hard drive, flash memory product, that we can expect from the other parties.