In yet more knee-jerk demands from the record companies, a so-called “iTax” has been called for, purportedly to recover money lost due to music piracy.

In the UK, this could mean an extra £2.25 per megabyte gigabyte of storage, meaning a 20Gb iPod would cost an extra £45.

Of course, it’s not just iPods that would be affected, but all portable, digital (MP3) players – it’s just convenient to throw around a tag like ‘iTax’ levelled at the world’s most popular portable digital jukebox.

Unsurprisingly, large hardware manufacturers such as Sony and Apple are opposed to this (though board meetings at Sony must be interesting – with a potential conflict of interest between the hardware and record label divisions)

What this proposal is effectively saying is: “We believe that everyone who buys a portable music player is involved in music piracy, and we can’t do much to stop it, so we’ll recoup some money by taxing the hardware.”

Alternatively, if the record companies don’t believe that everyone is pirating music, they are essentially saying “We know that not everyone pirates music, but many people do, so we’ll make every owner of an MP3 player (even law-abiding users) subsidise the pirates”

So, buying an MP3 player with a tax effectively labels you as a criminal, or an accessory to a crime – funnily enough both are illegal.

Maybe it’s hard to believe, but there are people who own portable music players for the sole purpose of listening to their own, legitimately purchased music, whilst on the move. I do – it’s easier than carrying around a bunch of CDs and a Minidisc player. I waited years for someone to invent a portable digital player like the iPod.

These players are not the cause of music piracy. They are another avenue for people to listen to both legitimate and pirated music. People were downloading and sharing music before iPods came on the scene. People were copying CDs before the file-sharing networks took off. People were doing tape-to-tape copies before CD players and the Internet.

These new technologies (particularly the Internet) do make it easier to share illegal music on a large scale – but they are not evil in themselves.

The record industry should be working with file-sharing networks to crack down on illegal copies of music (P2P is not illegal, either, though record companies would like you to think so – but the sharing of copyrighted material is never legal) – not taxing the hardware that plays it. By that measure, there should be a piracy tax on CD/DVD recorders, hi-fis, jack-to-jack leads, photocopiers…

Don’t penalise legitimate music-lovers for the illegal activities of others.