A taxa iPod no IHT:
"In the United States, recording labels want a bigger slice of Apple's success in digital music by seeking higher prices on downloaded songs. Japan's music industry has a different idea: putting fees on iPods.
The industry has asked the Japanese government to charge a royalty, to be added to the retail price of portable digital music players like Apple's iPod, which has been explosively popular here. Money earned from the fee, likely to be 2 percent to 5 percent of the retail price, would go to recording companies, songwriters and artists as compensation for lost revenue from home copying.
It is a familiar story of vested interests' feeling threatened by new technologies. Like their U.S. and European counterparts, Japanese recording companies are struggling to catch up with the Internet and the advances in digital recording technology.
But in Japan, the proposed fee has also touched off an unusual public battle over the influence that industry groups here still wield over the government and economy, the second-largest after the United States.
As a powerful political lobby, Japan's recording industry expected to get its way when it first asked for the fee last fall. Instead, its proposal remains stalled in one of Japan's normally rubber-stamp government committees. Meanwhile, the media mock the fee as the "iPod tax."