While I’m not Canadian, there are many things I’ve always respected about our neighbor to the north (or, as I like to call them, the 51st state) — they have a good human rights record, a good attitude about guns (see Michael Moore’s new film Bowling for Columbine) and they make a mean Cafe au Lait. But some things are not as good up there as down here in the good ol’ US of A, and here’s one example; the Copyright Board of Canada has proposed a tax on recordable media that would add $0.021 on every megabyte worth of digital media. That means $21 per gigabyte on hard-drive based MP3 players, and for something like the Lyra Jukebox, the tax alone would be $400 or more. Now, sure, that’s just those Canadian Dollars, not US Greenbacks, but that’s still alot of scratch to be paying the feds, even if they pay for your healthcare. Read the proposal at The Copyright Board (pdf).
Hardware Beyond the Hype