Canadians who bought an iPod last year could be eligible for a refund of up to $25, Apple Canada announced late Monday.
The company said it will return the “piracy” levy its customers paid on iPod products between December, 2003, and December, 2004, following a Supreme Court decision last month upholding a lower court's ruling that the surcharge was invalid.
“Apple is pleased that the Supreme Court of Canada let stand a lower-court ruling that blank-media levies on iPods are invalid, and will shortly announce a claims process so consumers can request a refund for the levies they paid,” the company said in a release.
The company is offering no timeline or information at this time on how users can obtain their refunds, but a company spokesman said that information would be made available soon.
The levy, which was collected by a third party, the Canadian Private Copying Collective, has long been applied to blank, recordable products like CDs, tapes, and mini-discs. In December, 2003, however, the Copyright Board of Canada said it would begin applying the levy to hard drive-based players, such as the iPod. Roughly $4-million was collected under the program.
The levy was set at $2 for each recorder with a capacity of 1 gigabyte, $15 for each device over 1GB and $25 for each recorder over 10GB of storage space. The money was intended to compensate artists whose works were pirated onto the devices.
The products affected are the low-end Ipod shuffle, with a maximum capacity of 1GB; the Ipod mini, which ranges between 4 and 6 GB, and the full-sized iPod, which has a storage capacity of 20 GB.
Apple applied the surcharge to its devices from December, 2003, to December, 2004, and anyone who bought the device in Canada could be eligible for the refund.
A CPCC spokeswoman said the levies would be returned to manufacturers and importers by the end of August.
Sony Canada, Wal-Mart, Dell Computer Corporation, and iRiver America were among the major companies that applied to the CPCC for reimbursement.
The president of the Canadian Recording Industry Association, Graham Henderson, welcomed the court's decision to remove the levy. He said the surcharge lent legitimacy to file sharing, something his organization has long fought.
“We have never thought that the levy should apply to portable devices or to the hard-drive of computer,” Mr. Henderson said. “We don't not want file-sharing to have that legitimacy.”
The CRIA represents Canada's four major record labels – Sony BMG, Universal, EMI and Warner. Mr. Henderson said advocates for file-sharing would use that levy as a cover to say file sharing was legal, because people the artists were being paid through the surcharge.
“I don't want to be paid 2 cents on a copy; nor do any of the other copyright industries,” Mr. Henderson said, adding that or every “legal” sale is worth 33 times an “illegal” one.
Mr. Henderson said the CRIA is not after the people who copy music for their own use, people he refers to as the “good guys.”
His association, he said, is really after the people who are profiting from massive file sharing and music piracy.
