This saga has been ongoing for more than a year and a half — see previous entries from Jan. 21, 2003, Dec. 11, 2002 and March 12, 2002 — but now we have a final answer from the Copyright Board of Canada regarding the CPCC’s proposed tariff hikes on recordable CDs and DVDs, flash media and hard-drive-based MP3 players like the iPod. And the news is mostly good overall. The Copyright Board has rejected increased tariffs on CDs and new tariffs on DVDs and flash cards (which can be used, after all, for data backup and your own material — I imagine that most flash media is sold for use in digital cameras) and imposed a tariff of up to $25 on hard-drive-based MP3 players. When you consider that the original tariff rate proposed was $21 per gigabyte — or $840 extra on a 40-GB iPod costing $729 — this isn’t bad at all. Read the news: CBC News Online, Globe Technology. See also Richard’s post; he’s been tracking this issue for a long time.

Update: A pretty good CBC News Online backgrounder.