Levy Increase

The Copyright Board has raised the levy on blank CD-R, CD-RW, CD-R Audio, CD-RW Audio or MiniDisc to $0.29 from $0.21 each.

According to the certified tariff:

(3) The Copyright Act requires that the Copyright Board set a
tariff for the years 2008 and 2009. However, in a correspondence
of November 14, 2007, and in a press release of December 18,
2007, the Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC) indicated
its intention not to collect any increases in levies retroactively
when the certified tariff for 2008-2009 is issued.

The Board's decision dated December 5, 2008 and the certified tariff dated December 6, 2008 and other material are available here.

Anyone still using blank CD-R, CD-RW, CD-R Audio, CD-RW Audio or MiniDisc media may want to try to stock up before the increased levies are passed through.

Ironically, due the the levy scheme, the price of blank DVDs, which hold about seven times more data than blank CDs, is now much lower in many cases than blank CDs. This is because there is no levy on blank DVDs, that battle having been won in the 2003-2004 hearing and not renewed.

The Copyright Board's decision at the outset of this tariff hearing to proceed with a tariff on iPods and other digital audio recorders, etc. was quickly and decisively quashed by the Federal Court of Appeal on January 10, 2008. This leaves the CPCC with blank CDs as the only significant source of levy income. The CPCC clearly still hopes to impose a levy on iPods, etc. via a change to the Copyright Act. There are significant internal battles in the music industry about the levy. In the aforesaid court case that quahsed the hearing on an iPod levy, CRIA actually intervened against the CPCC.

Disclosure - I've been involved for years in opposing the levy scheme in Canada both at the Copyright Board and in the Courts.

HK