A proposed levy on digital storage devices, known as the "iPod tax," has been quashed by the Federal Court of Appeal after opponents argued it assumed illegal behaviour on the part of Canadian consumers.

Following hearings on Jan.9, the court ruled that the Canadian Copyright Board did not have the right to impose new taxes on digital music players and storage devices. The taxes were to be introduced later this year.

Canada's controversial "iPod tax" has once again been struck down in court. The Federal Court of Appeal yesterday rejected a decision by Canada's Copyright Board to collect fees from would-be MP3 player customers to compensate artists for revenue lost to "private copying."

The proposed tax included a CAD5 strike on digital audio players with less than 1GB memory and CAD75 for digital audio players with more than 30GB.

The main problem with the previous Mac Pro models and in fact with the first Xeon 5xxx platform was the low performance due to the bottleneck of the memory bandwidth.

It seems that the new Mac Pro do not suffer from this early adoption defect anymore, as illustrated by a benchmark assay run by Primate Labs to compare a new Mac Pro 8 cores 2.8 GHz with the previous Mac Pro 8 cores 3.0GHz.

I'm hoping that part of Steve Jobs' keynote on Tuesday will be the news that all iTunes music is going to become DRM-free, but I'm not holding my breath. The big four major labels have all made Damascene conversions to the cause of unprotected music downloads, but they want to sell them through Amazon, not Apple.

The official reason for this is that the majors are worried about Apple's dominance of digital music. But the real reason is that they want you to pay more for your downloads.....

A bit part of this is trying to knock Apple down a peg and show Steve Jobs who's boss (which is ironic, as it's the labels' insistence on DRM that's created the iTunes/iPod lock-in that helped make iTunes such a big deal). But more than that... Despite the massively reduced production costs of downloads, despite the massively reduced distribution costs, despite the record contracts that mean artists get a pittance from download sales, despite the Long Tail that means selling lots of old records can mean healthy profits, what the labels really want is to put the price of music back up again.

Amazon.com has now secured the right to sell DRM-free music from all four major labels, snagging Sony BMG.

On Monday, Sony BMG announced it was lifting DRM from its digital music, but only through a gift card service called Platinum MusicPass, which was available through bricks and mortar retail channels. Amazon wouldn't have any such shenanigans, and cut the strings Sony had attached.

The move gives Amazon a clear competitive advantage over its rivals Rhapsody and Apple's iTunes store. Rhapsody's songs are tied to Windows DRM, while the only portable player that supports Apple's DRM-protected songs is Apple's own iPod.

Prepare to peel off your bumper stickers - the Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA) may disappear in a merger of trade groups, Variety reports.

According to the Hollywood trade paper, EMI has formally filed to leave the global trade body that represents sound recording owners, the IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industry), by 31 March. The IFPI has 1,400 members in 75 countries.

By constantly redesigning its products, introducing new ones and trumpeting the changes in high-profile marketing campaigns, Apple has habituated many of its customers to living in a semipermanent upgrade cycle for new gadgets. The risk is in disappointing consumers who feel their new purchases are instantly outmoded. Someone who got a Mac laptop over the holidays, for example, could feel bitter if Apple, as expected, introduces a new portable Mac at Macworld.

It's been one heck of a year for Apple. The company has been riding from one triumph to another, from the announcement of the iPhone at the Macworld conference a year ago, to its introduction in June, to the release of new Macs, iPods, and productivity applications, and closing the year with a surge in market share.

And now, the Macworld Conference & Expo is coming, running Jan. 14 through Jan. 18 in San Francisco. It's the time and place where the Apple community gets together to celebrate, to learn more about the technology, and to get excited about products to come.

Office 2008 for the Mac has some new features, but it isn't nearly as radical an overhaul as the latest Windows version was. While the latter junked all the menus and traditional toolbars in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, the new Mac version retains the familiar menus and toolbars. It doesn't use the so-called Ribbon, a band of icons that is the signature feature of Windows Office 2007.

Apple fans think different about product announcements than Windows users do. Windows users want the facts, and want them fast. By the time Microsoft announces something big, it's already been leaked. The announcement is kind of like a ceremony to describe what everybody already knew.

Apple's major announcements are usually surprises. Mac fans don't know ahead of time -- and they don't really want to know, because that would take the fun out of solving the puzzle. Apple fans like the mystery. In the weeks leading up to a major announcement, they like to scrutinize clues, scour the net for rumors, and talk and talk and talk.

Online retailers, including Apple Inc.'s own store, have begun taking pre-orders for Microsoft Corp.'s Office 2008 for Mac, the first new version of the application suite on Apple's platform in nearly four years.

The bundle, which includes updates to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage, is set for a Jan. 15 launch at next week's MacWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco.

Take a look at the software on your Mac. A subtle revolution is taking place for Mac users. The future for Mac applications and utilities is better than very good. It's great.

Productivity, efficiency, ease of use, and security will combine with graphics and database capability built in to Mac OS X. Here's my best list of the best new Mac software.

With a new visual interface including new themes sounds and effects as well as a semantic file manager, speed and multimedia handling improvements, KDE 4 is a major release for the Linux desktop.

While many of KDE 4's new features will be visible to end users, a lot of work has been done under the hood that will benefit developers too with new frameworks, including Phonon for multimedia, Plasma for desktop and panel interface and Strigi for search.

The sum total of all KDE 4's improvements could well serve to help bolster its adoption against its Linux desktop rival GNOME as well as Microsoft's Windows.

It looks like some think that OS X may be "killing" Linux on the desktop. I'm not sure that's the case, but it's an interesting point to explore. It's true that Apple has a much higher percentage of desktop users than Linux does....

In most cases though, I don't think you can definitively say that if a user didn't go with OS X that they would have gone with Linux. Apple does a lot of things really good. Marketing is certainly one of them, but they do create slick machines that are very appealing. The fact that most traditional UNIX tools work with OS X is huge....

In the end, however, I'd still contend that more OS X sales are good for Linux… not bad. It gets people used to not using Windows. It introduces them to a UNIX-based OS. It opens doors that would be hard for Linux to open. Once the Windows monopoly is broken, it will be easy for all other operating systems to get a fair look. I welcome that day.

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"Every CES, there seem to be trends and themes that lurk below the surface of those that most pundits cover. This year, for example, much of the focus was on the Blu-ray versus HD DVD battle, due to Warner Brother's announcement of Blu-ray exclusivity."

Every time you install an application with a traditional installer under Mac OS X, you have to enter your user password first, unless, of course, the installer has no provision for that. And most do.

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