Japan not to levy its proposed ‘iPod Tax’

Japan has finally abandoned a copyright law revision, which aimed at charging royalties on digital music players. This proposed charge was popularly called the ‘iPod Tax’ in the country. the decision to abandon the plans came after discussions in a government panel produced no consensus on ways to police violations.

The final decision came in from the Cultural Agency committee after yearlong debates on the issue failed to reach at any consensus. The agencies argued over the outdated mechanism of levying an extra copyright fee on gadgets, which levies around 3 percent of the product’s wholesale price. These fines are applied on recording devices, which are capable of duplicating copyrighted material.

And since quite sometime now the recording industry in the country is demanding from the government that similar charges should be applied on the recording devices with hard-drives and this includes the popular digital music player Apple iPod. The organizations opposing this kind of an extra levy claimed that the system is an obsolete way of monitoring purchases of digital music and other works at a time when online buying of such content was becoming popular.

Apple has recently entered the online music sales market with their iTunes Japan store and has had phenomenal success. However, the company had no comments on this so-called ‘iPod Tax’.