Japan dumps iPod tax idea

Japan has dumped a plan to charge an extra fee to those who buy MP3 players – a move not surprisingly dubbed the “iPod tax.”

Currently the government adds 3% to the price tag of recording devices and other gadgets used to duplicate copyrighted material. According to the AP: “Since last year, recording companies and other lobbies here have been grumbling that the same system should be applied to recording devices with hard-drives, including MP3 players like Apple’s iPods as well as flash-memory players.”

Wow, that doesn’t sound like recording companies at all. They’re usually so fair about the whole MP3 thing…

Any tacked-on royalty fees would have gone to the record companies – not the hardware makers – but Japanese officials abandoned the idea after they couldn’t figure out how to police violations.

Via My Way News