Japanese Music Industry: Tax iTunes

The Japanese music industry is lobbying the government to impose a "fee" on every song downloaded via iTunes to make up for the chance downloaded songs might be pirated. Strange, I always thought gigantic trusts were against unnecessary taxation.

Japanese music distributors have been battling with Apple since Apple made their way into the country, selling over 1 million songs in their first weekend. Combine this with the battles Steve Jobs is in with the American music industry, and we're looking at a pretty directed effort to kill a technology that's kept music prices stable for two years. That's pretty much never happened, and the industry isn't taking kindly to it at all. We can only hope this opens things even further for smaller, independent music studios.