Man, after years of getting shafted, Canadian Apple fans are on the lucky streak of a lifetime! A couple of weeks ago, Canucks finally got access to their very own iTunes Music Store-- complete with the lowest absolute pricing anywhere. Apple retail stores haven't migrated north just yet, but Apple has officially confirmed that it'll open its first stores in Toronto sometime in the middle of 2005. And just to make it a hat trick, now it looks like the price of iPods is about to drop sometime soonish, too. Geez, what's next? The January Macworld Expo officially moving to Vancouver in 2006?

That's right, we said cheaper iPods. Remember way back when Canada passed a levy on recordable media in order to collect a bunch of extra money to give to recording artists, ostensibly to offset revenue lost to music that was stolen instead of purchased? The theory is that people use the recordable media to store downloaded music, so they should pay a tax on said media to reimburse the artists whose music they've swiped. You don't need us to enumerate the four dozen holes in that plan's premise and execution; the relevant bit here is that hard drives in MP3 players count as recordable media under the levy plan, meaning that iPods up north currently have a $25 surcharge added to their price. (That's $25 Canadian, so it's not quite as bad as you think, but still.)

Well, here's where the latest good news comes in: faithful viewer Graham Walker sent us an article in The Globe and Mail which reports that "Canada's Federal Court of Appeal ruled that special copyright levies applied to digital music players are not legal." Apparently the wording of the Copyright Act, which is what gave the Copyright Board of Canada the right to impose levies on recordable media in the first place, doesn't actually grant it any authority to extend the levies to MP3 players like the iPod. As a result, the Board must immediately cease collecting the levy on such players, which will presumably drive the price of iPods down for consumers-- assuming that Apple lowers its prices accordingly instead of just pocketing the difference itself. When last we checked, the Apple Store Canada was still charging $429 for a 20 GB iPod, alongside a bright red note that the "price includes CPCC's Blank Media Levy - $25," so if you were planning to order an iPod there, you might want to hold off until Apple catches up with the judge's ruling so you can save a little cash.

So now that it's been revealed that anyone who's bought an iPod in Canada since the levy was passed a year ago was overcharged by $25 because the CPCC overstepped its legal authority, what are the odds that the CPCC will reimburse customers who send them a bill? Slim, sure, but given the luck of Canadian Apple fans lately, who knows? Maybe it's worth a shot. After all, if you get your money back, you can hop on over to the iTMS and feed your iPod another couple of albums-- thus handing your money right back to the music industry who took it from you in the first place. See? Everyone's happy.