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Japan Scuttles Proposed "iPod Tax"

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on December 2, 2005 - 10:33am.
Tokyo - A plan proposed by Japan's recording industry that would have added a tax of between 2% and 5% to the cost of portable MP3 players has been rejected by a committee appointed by the government's Agency for Cultural Affairs, The New York Times reported on Friday. Public criticism of the proposal, which the recording industry said was needed to compensate songwriters and copyright holders for digital music piracy losses, led the government to appoint professors and copyright lawyers to the committee; such a committee would usually have been stacked with record industry executives, The Times said. Committee spokesman Hiroyuki Suzuki told The Times the group was unable to reach a consensus, and as a result was forced to reject the proposal. A similar tax on MP3 players has been proposed in the Netherlands, while a Canadian court last year ruled that country's iPod tax to be illegal.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Japan-iPod-Tax.html

tags: Japan | iPod Tax |



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