Friday’s decision by the Copyright Board of Canada futher clarifies the 1999 ruling on Private copying, having a profound impact on the current campaign by the RIAA in the US to halt P2P sharing.
The 1999 ruling introduced levies on blank analog and digital media such as cassette tapes and blank CD’s, compensating the artists for their works that may be copied onto such devices. On Friday, the copyright board futher clarified its stance to include data stored on “Non-Removable Memory” such as solid state memory in mp3 players and hard-drives in computers.
There is still some uncertainty about how the ruling applies to P2P uploading, but it appears that downloading music from P2P networks for personal use is legal.
