Canadians usually have to pay a blank media levy on all blank writable media, and hard drives in mp3 players. This levy (small extra charge) goes to the recording industry to pay them to allow us to make personal copies of music from friends or whomever. (I.E. legally download mp3’s from the net.)

The Canadian Supreme Court have decided that they won’t hear a case involving extra fees for iPods and other MP3 players, thus rekindling the debate over the legality of file swapping.

“The country’s trade association for record labels quickly welcomed the Supreme Court’s action as a sign that unauthorized file swapping was once again viewed as unambiguously illegal.”

Now I know most of the readers of FG probably are from the USA, and thus this does not matter to you, but here in Canada, our iPods and everything are a little more expensive due to this extra charge we have to pay. Without the charge we lose the right to download music, and thus our version of the RIAA wins.

Another sad day, as the business world tries to stop us from enjoying music. I really believed that the US would see the error of their ways, and create a media levy system like Canada, and that our way would be the model for the world, rather than the way that the US does it with lawsuits.