No levy on IPods, court rules
TORONTO (CP) - The fight over a levy on IPods and other digital music devices ended Thursday when the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear any further arguments on the matter.
That means there will be no levy applied to digital audio recorders such as Apple's popular IPod and IPod Shuffle as well as other MP3 players like IRiver.
"Obviously we're disappointed. We felt it was self-evident that those products are sold for the purpose of copying music," said David Basskin, of the Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC), the non-profit agency which collects tariffs on behalf of musicians and record companies.
The group had wanted the high court to overturn last year's Federal Court of Appeal decision which quashed the levy on the popular gadgets.
The non-profit agency had been collecting the tariff - $2 for non-removable memory capacity of up to one GB, $15 for one to 10 GBs, $25 for more than 10 GB - since December 2003 through a tax built into the price of the devices.
It stopped in December 2004 when the Federal Court overturned the policy at the urging of retailers and manufacturers such as Future Shop, Apple Canada and Dell Computer Corporation of Canada.
The CPCC argued that since the new technology opened yet another avenue to make illegal copies of songs, a levy should be collected on behalf of music creators.
The group said Thursday that approximately $4 million was collected between December 2003 and December 2004.
The money is sitting in an account and will be returned to the importers and manufacturers of the products, said Basskin.
The CPCC is an non-profit agency which collects and distributes tariffs on behalf of performers, songwriters, music producers and record companies. It also collects a levy on blank audio such as CDs and mini-discs.
COUP D'STEW
Sorry Stewie.
The highly anticipated, uncensored "Family Guy" movie doesn't come out on DVD until September, but some Internet whiz-kids are already trading full-length, pirated copies of "Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story" online.
The film is technically three closely related, never-before-aired "Family Guy" episodes linked together.
One tells a tale about Stewie - the evil baby bent on world domination - that closely resembles Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's fall. In it, Stewie, sporting a wild Saddamesque beard, is found hiding in a spider hole - as was the Butcher of Baghdad.
Murray keeps up the good work
NEW YORK — For a self-described retiree, Billy Murray never stops working.
"I'm officially retired," he joked at the premiere of his newest movie. "I officially retired before this!"
"This" is Broken Flowers, which won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and stars the soulful Murray as a playboy who finds out that he might have a grown son from a former relationship.
An uncharacteristically gregarious Murray turned up at the film's premiere Wednesday night, telling reporters that he'd just had "a perfectly good cup of ice cream that someone took from me, so I had to do this," meaning red-carpet interviews. Dessert aside, his secret to chilling out on a hot summer night?
"This seersucker's pretty cool," Murray said.
In the film, which opens Aug. 5, Murray's Don Johnston embarks on a cross-country journey to track down the boy and becomes, as his character says, "a stalker in a Taurus." Along the way, he reconnects with old girlfriends played by Jessica Lange, Sharon Stone and Frances Conroy.
Could Murray, a father of five sons, imagine a situation like Johnston's? "It could happen to anyone," he said. "Well, not to a woman. A woman would know."
As for the future: "Now that I'm retired, I'm going to try again to learn guitar. And I'm going to try to work on my Spanish. I can speak some French, but I've got to work on my Spanish."
'Penguins' march defies summer box office trend
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - At summer film box offices plagued by slow ticket sales, the hottest documentary this year is about a very cold topic: Emperor Penguins in Antarctica.
"March of the Penguins" is rising fast up the charts and on Thursday is expected to top $12 million in U.S. and Canadian ticket sales, said Mark Gill, president of domestic distributor, Warner Independent Pictures.
This week, the cinematic tale of the penguins' mating season will surpass hits "Winged Migration" and "Super Size Me" to become the fourth highest-grossing documentary of all time in domestic theaters, according to box office trackers.
Concert film, "Madonna: Truth or Dare," at $15 million, looks destined to succumb, and even No. 2 "Bowling for Columbine," director Michael Moore's Oscar-winner, at $21.6 million could be beaten when "March of the Penguins" expands to 1,400 theaters on Aug. 5 from just under 700 currently.
"It definitely has a shot (at 'Bowling for Columbine')," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box office tracking company Exhibitor Relations Co. Inc.
"This is a breath of fresh air in terms of positive news on the box office front, and it also shows that people want something different. They want something unique," he added.
The No. 1 documentary is Moore's 2004 hit "Fahrenheit 9/11" at $120 million, which most industry watchers agree is an anomaly.
"March of the Penguins" tosses away old rules of documentary-making to become more like a narrative feature film with different story lines, plot twists and characters.
The story follows the Emperor Penguins on a long march across frozen expanses from their summer feeding grounds to their winter mating arena. Audiences watch the penguins pair off, the female bear an egg and the male carry it on his feet to keep it from freezing until it hatches.
French director Luc Jacquet, whose four-man crew spent 14 months in Antarctica filming the penguins, likens the film to an Impressionist painting. "I wanted to tell a story that would capture emotional involvement," he said.
In the French version, actors' voices were used to speak the penguin roles much like an animated movie and French pop music was used for the score. Neither, however, worked for U.S. audiences, according to Gill.
For the English version, the distributors trimmed the movie by about five minutes, hired noted screenwriter Jordan Roberts to produce a narration that is read by Morgan Freeman, and commissioned Alex Wurman to write a symphonic score.
"All that seems to have made a difference," Gill said. "What really works is when you get a movie that people are so adamant about that they force their friends to go, and that's what this is. You get one or two of those a year."