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The main link is the Copyright Board's decision on the blank media levy; here's my fast, first-impression review of it. In a few words: they kept the rates on CD-R, audio cassettes, and similar at existing levels; added a levy on portable music players with built-in memories; and declined to levy any other new categories (for instance, DVD-R media). The new levy on portable music players (technically, on the memory permanently embedded in such players - note that it wouldn't apply to memory or players separate from each other) is $2 for capacities up to 1Gb, $15 for more than 1Gb but less than 10Gb, and $25 for capacities greater than 10Gb.
The decision also includes discussion of the "BML makes file trading legal!" concept (verdict: downloading sometimes, but uploading never), the "DRM users should forfeit their BML payments!" concept (verdict: they'll take that into account when DRM is more popular by applying a discount rate, and at the moment, the discount rate is zero.), and the "if your hard drive comes with any sound files on it then it is a non-blank audio recording medium and so levy exempt" (verdict: they decline to solve that because it involves answering technology-specific questions beyond the Board's scope, but hard drives are generally not covered anyway so it's not a big deal.)
In more detail: The decision is 97 pages and goes into a lot of detail, much of it on topics I don't find interesting, like the details of how they attempt to estimate royalty rates - not the most exciting stuff because their final decision on most of the rates comes down to "We don't really know what the heck's going on, so we'll stick with the current rates that seem to be more or less working". They decline to levy new media (like hard drives and DVD-Rs) mostly because there's a lot of evidence that that media is only tangentially used for music and mostly used for other things, and there's no good data on exactly to what extent it's used for music. That's slightly worrying because it certainly seems that they would be willing to levy your general-purpose hard drive if they thought they could accurately estimate what percentage of people use hard drives for music, and their estimate was significantly more than zero.
Permanently-installed media in music devices (iPods, etc.) gets a new levy. It seems like the Board feels justified in levying that because it's pretty clear that it's used primarily for music... although the iPod in particular is an interesting case because unlike most portable memory-based digital music players, iPods do have a significant use as a generic USB hard drive for carrying non-musical stuff around. At least they saw the wisdom of avoiding a per-megabyte fee, though; making it flat-rate avoids the problem where plummeting media costs eventually make the levy dwarf the actual cost of the media. It's worth thinking about the fact that this new levy applies only to permanently-installed media. I have some friends who sell car MP3/Ogg players with no media but a space in the chassis to install an IDE hard drive. As far as I can tell, that configuration isn't covered... but if they sell you a blank drive in the same transaction, is that covered? If they sell you the player and a blank drive and charge you $5 to install it for you, is that covered? Where does the line occur? Also, if lots of people are buying blank media and media-free devices to put together, the Board seems willing to start levying that. They aren't doing so yet mostly because they don't have accurate ways to estimate it.
On "is downloading legal": Lots of people have suggested that because the BML exists, therefore Napsteresque file-trading is completely legal in Canada. That's wishful thinking, because the list of activities made legal by the BML specifically excludes making work available by telecommunication. If you post music on the Web, then you are in clear violation. A slightly more interesting position would be that although the existence of the BML might not make file sharing legal, it should. That may be true, but it's not something the Board can decide. So all that remains is the idea that, okay, posting files for others to download isn't legal, but because of the BML, it is legal to do the downloading. So they can't get you for receiving files through peer-to-peer, but only for sending them. I haven't read the Board's decision word-for-word, but it appears that they agree with that to some extent: they seem to be saying that downloading is legalized under the BML, but only when you're downloading onto "blank audio recording media" on which the BML could be paid.
That gets murky, though, because what really counts? They reject the idea that it must be media for which the levy has been paid, because they (rightly) point out that then it depends on whether they chose to levy a particular form of media. They don't have to levy all eligible media, and it shouldn't be possible to outlaw downloading onto a particular kind of media just by not levying it when it's eligible. They conclude (rightly, I think), that it must be based on whether the media could be levied, not whether it actually is... but that's a problem for computer hard drives because they never really decided whether they could levy computer hard drives, they just said "It isn't important whether we can, because we don't want to." The bottom line is that I'm sure uploading is illegal, but it was all along; and it's still not clear whether the BML makes downloading legal. It's kind of nice that they even acknowledged this idea, though.
On DRM precluding BML payments: they give that some credance, but instead of (what I would prefer) making works not count for levy purposes when they're released under DRM, what they propose to do is to figure out what percentage of copying is blocked by DRM and then apply that percentage to reduce the levy. It's another of these averaging out things - everyone pays the levy whether they copy or not, and everyone (eligible) receives money from the levy whether they use DRM or not. The punishment for consumers copying music is applied to all consumers, and the punishment for privilege holders using DRM is applied to all privilege holders. Not a good situation, but at least they acknowledged that DRM is a good reason to withhold some fees. I can't really argue with their setting the discount rate at zero in this cycle - there really isn't that much attempted DRM out there, and there's no successful DRM.
On the "non-blank audio recording media" dodge: They didn't really solve much there although they point out that that is stretching the Act. I wouldn't hold out much hope for that dodge working in future negotiations.
The report ends with a "dissenting opinion" by Vice-Chairman Callary. It may be worth reading, but really, the stuff he dissented about was all in the boring parts, exact discount rates and estimation procedures for computing the levy numbers. It's not one of those exciting Supreme Court-style dissents that reveal important ideological differences.
[Copyright Board issues BML decision]
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