necessary, at least for the recording in- dustry if it wanted to have the Copyright Act apply to that new technology," says Tim Bourne, an associate with Ridout & Maybee LLP in Ottawa. "Ring tones [are] just the opposite. That was a case where the court was able to stretch the existing legislation far enough to encom- pass this new technology of a cellphone that played certain copyrighted works. "So there's a real contrast between the MP3 case and the ring tone case because of that. One demonstrates that there are some limitations of the Copyright Act in applying to new technologies, whereas
the ring tones case demonstrates that the Copyright Act in some situations may be broad enough to evolve as new technologies evolve," he says. The MP3 case was Apple Canada
Inc. v. Canadian Private Copying Col- lective. In it, a three-member panel of the Federal Court of Appeal rejected a CPCC levy that would have raised by as much as $75 the price of MP3 players and devices with USB storage, depend- ing on the storage capacity of the device. The court said the Copyright Board — the body that determines royalties for copyrighted works — didn't have the
authority to impose the levy on digital recorders. The CPCC, a collective of composers,
recording artists, publishers, and record labels, asked the Copyright Board last year to consider applying the fee to MP3 players in Canada. This request followed a Federal Court of Appeal decision two years ago that rejected the application of a levy on MP3 players. "I think it's very unlikely there will be an appeal, and if there was, it's very unlikely that it would have succeeded, given that the Supreme Court has already rejected a leave mo- tion on the very same issue before," says
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