This sure is slipping by quietly, like many things in Canada (even in the Canadian media): it looks very likely there will be new, very hefty fees on blank media in Canada. The law, which would surtax an Apple iPod to the tune of $210CDN and even a (not so huge) 160GB internal hard drive $336. In fact the plan is to tax a wide variety of digital media, removable or not, and more significantly, regardless of end use. The tax on blank CD-R’s is already more than the purchase price and will no doubt be levied on top of an already scary 15% sales tax. The tax is considered a done deal (with some exceptions for governmenty organizations, as is often the case).
The sad part about all this is that it is such a blunt way of tackling the problem of compensating artists, and it will add to Canada’s struggle to be competitive. It is a very good idea to try to have artists compensated for their work, but this type of thing really just increases the technology industry/government divide. It’s an old-fashioned solution to a rather new problem – modern computers are multifunction devices and storage media are used in a wide variety of ways, the significant minority of which are related to copyright infringement. Any data intensive business is caught in the legal/governmental crossfire.