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The Canadian Copyright Board dropped a big lump of coal into Canadian consumers' Christmas stockings last Friday by approving a new "levy" on the sale of iPods and other digital music players as well as removable memory cards, because they can be used to copy movies and music.

A "levy" kickback to music copyright holders on blank recordable media like DVDs and cassettes in place since 2000 has siphoned a reported $150 million from consumers wallets over the past seven years.

However, the expanded levy amounts proposed last week up the rake-off ante substantially, to as much as $75 for a digital audio recorder with more than 30 gigabytes capacity.

The bagmen at the Canadian Private Copying Collective have collected a reported $150 million since 2000. The CPCC distributes monies collected (minus administration fees) to registered artists, at least rich, big-name ones. As the CPCC Website notes, "Since no inventory of privately copied tracks exists, distribution is based on representative samples of radio airplay and album sales, which are given equal weight in the distribution. Together they provide a proxy for determining the titles that Canadians typically copy for private use."

Translated, that means when you get hosed for an extra $75 on your new iPod, the money will go to further line the well-padded pockets of the likes of Celine Dion, Avril Lavigne, and Sarah MacLachlan, but little if any of it to struggling indie bands or folk artists that may be more to your taste.

That's all bad enough, but a second shoe threatens to drop in the new year with the Harper government fixing to bring Canadian copyright legislation into conformity with demands from the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) by making it illegal to download or share songs on the Internet without paying a fee.

This means that on the one hand you'll have the Canadian Private Copying Collective hosing you at time of purchase on the assumption you'll be filling your iPod or memory card with freeloaded music, short-circuiting our justice system's long-standing principle of presumption of innocence until proven guilty, while the government bends over for big music biz and makes criminals of anyone who does what the Copyright Board and the CPCC a priori insist they're doing and nailing them for with the up-front levy.

Reforms to the Canadian Copyright Act were promised by the Harper government in the Speech From The Throne, presumably to be modeled on the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), one of the worst and most regressive pieces of legislation ever enacted by the U.S. government.

The DMCA has allowed the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to sue persons it alleges have downloaded music via peer-to-peer file-sharing software over the Internet, including 12-year-olds, families on social assistance, and seniors whose visiting grandchildren used their computers -- people like Jammie Thomas, a Minnesota single mom found guilty in October of infringing record labels' copyrights on 24 songs she downloaded online, and ordered to pay $9,250 in statutory damages per song for a grand total of $222,000.

Currently, casual downloading music for free is not illegal in Canada, as reaffirmed in Federal Court Justice Konrad von Finckenstein's March, 2005 ruling that the CRIA failed to prove 29 unnamed file sharers it had sued had violated copyright material owned by its members. His ruling amplified a previous decision by the Copyright Board that downloading music in this country is legal.

Even if Draconian, DMCA-like copyright legislation is passed in Canada, chances of being detected and sued by the music biz industry's legal vampires will remain minuscule. As Alison Wenham, chief of the indie label alliance AIM commented earlier this year: "You can fight piracy valiantly on the beaches and in the trenches, but you can't win it. The average file sharer has as much chance of being caught as they have of being hit by a meteorite."

However, what it will do is make vast numbers of Canadians techinically criminals for a behaviour that has become culturally commonplace, and that can't be in the common interest. Digital technology has made conventional copyright law obsolete and unenforceable. Like it or not, sharing (or, depending on your politics, "stealing") music has become a way of life for millions. If the massive benefits facilitated by technological innovation in the dissemination of information means the commercial music business will have to put up with piracy, I say so be it.

Enhancement of the common good far outweighs problems it causes for narrow vested interests.

The Harper government is dead wrong on this issue.

Hopefully, they can be convinced to rethink it before it's too late.

You can contact Minister of Industry The Hon. Jim Prentice by e-mail at: Minister.Industry@ic.gc.ca and The Hon. Josée Verner, Minister of Canadian Heritage, at this Web address: www.pch.gc.ca/pc-ch/min/verner/contact/index_e.cfm

n Charles W. Moore is a Nova Scotian freelance writer and editor whose articles have appeared in more than 40 magazines and newspapers in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., and Australia.