Canadian MP Charlie Angus, a former rocker, has formally introduced a bill meant to ease the legal uncertainty around format shifting. He proposes a trade: Canada's levy on items like blank CDs gets expanded to devices like iPods, and in return people can legally transfer their own music to devices like iPods.

Such a plan might sound bizarre to US ears, where format- and time-shifting are assumed to be legal so long as no DRM circumvention is involved, but it remains legally dubious in countries like Canada and the UK. Shifting a song from a CD to a computer to an iPod does, after all, create new copies of the work—and copyright holders have long claimed compensation for such uses.

In fact, Canada has had such a scheme since 1997 in the form of a "private copying levy." Blank media for music is hit with a special fee to compensate artists and rightsholders for the "private copying" assumed to be taking place, but the levy has always been limited in scope; "devices" were not included.

Back in 2007, the Copyright Board of Canada decided that the levy should extend to devices like the iPod, not just to blank media. The Board proposed a fee structure such that any device with more than 30GB of space would be hit with a CAN$75 levy on top of its retail price. In 2008, that decision was shot down by the Canadian Federal Court of Appeal, which found that the Board exceeded its legal authority in proposing the change.

Angus' new bill would provide that legal authority.

"Digital locks and suing fans are not going to prevent people from copying music from one format to another," he said in a statement announcing the new bill. "The levy is a solution that works. By updating it, we will ensure that artists are getting paid for their work, and that consumers aren’t criminalized for moving their legally-obtained music from one format to another."

Note that Angus focuses on format-shifting only; "the levy provides legal certainty for fans to copy songs onto an iPod or MP3 player," he added. The issue of how the levy applies to music obtained from P2P networks remains controversial in Canada, where industry has long claimed that the money only covers things like format-shifting.

Back in 2004, federal appellate judge Konrad von Finckenstein (now Canada's top telecoms regulator) ruled that "the downloading of a song for a person's private use does not constitute infringement." He cited a section of Canada's copyright law which says that copies of musical works downloaded "onto an audio recording medium for the private use of the person who makes the copy does not constitute an infringement of the copyright in the musical work, the performer's performance or the sound recording."

But what's a "medium"? As the recording industry said at the time, "Downloading pirated music is not legal in Canada... The copyright law conclusions in the case he cites were overturned on appeal. In fact, the Federal Court of Appeal has subsequently twice ruled that the private copying regime doesn't apply to downloads made to hard drives." Internal computer hard drives were not covered by the levy.

Unless Angus is prepared to extend the levy to computers as well, getting access to the music might remain a problem, since most music is still stored on computers and loaded into devices like iPods. In addition, the entire levy system only covers music; movies, TV shows, and video games would be unaffected and would remain illegal to share without permission.

Then there's DRM. As law professor Michael Geist points out, "The industry is pushing for anti-circumvention rules that would prohibit Canadians from picking the digital lock on copy controls found on CDs. If Canadians have paid for the right to copy via the levy, surely those rights should not be trumped by the use of DRM."