Canada approves P-to-P music downloads

Canadians can legally download peer-to-peer music files, although uploading them is still illegal, the Canadian Copyright Board ruled Friday.

So long as music is being recorded purely for personal use, and not being sold, rented or otherwise disseminated to other people, its use is legal, the board said.

It does not matter whether the source of the recording is a pre-owned track, a borrowed CD or a track downloaded from the Internet, the board said. The combination of the latter two rules means that recording a CD for a friend is illegal, but handing the CD to the same friend and letting them make a copy for their own use is legal.

The board also imposed a levy on manufacturers and importers of MP3 music players with non-removable memory, depending on their storage capacity. Players with memory capacity of less than 1G byte will be subject to a levy of C$2 (US$1.52), those with between 1G byte and 10G bytes will be levied C$10, and any players with more than 10G bytes will face a levy of C$25.

The levies are paid to the Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC), which distributes the money to authors, performers and producers of music in Canada.

Current levies on recording media will remain the same until the end of 2004, the board said, at C$0.29 on audio tapes longer than 40 minutes, C$0.21 on CD-Rs (CD-recordables) and CD-RWs (CD-rewritables) and C$0.77 on CD-R Audio, CD-RW Audio and MiniDisks.

A request from the CPCC for levies on blank DVDs, removable memory cards and removable micro hard drives was turned down because the board did not believe they are ordinarily used for copying music, it said.