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Have You Paid Your Bertelsmann Tax Today?
Mwongozi writes "Germany is planning to slap new taxes on computer, telecommunications and Internet products to ensure that authors are properly rewarded for the use of their work, a newspaper said Wednesday. The Berliner Zeitung said proposals had been drafted requiring manufacturers of goods from computers to printers, modems, compact disc "burners" and other devices to pay royalty fees that would then be forwarded to music and film companies." My guess is that Bertelsmann, the world's third largest media company, has a little something to do with this. In the U.S., any devices intended for digital audio are already taxed similarly to the above proposal but general-purpose computing devices are not. (Though the RIAA sought to include them too.) Has anyone considered what an extraordinary situation it is where government tax collectors are collecting taxes which are funneled straight to corporations?
You aren't paying anything on CD-R's. You are paying it if you were to buy a Music CD-R. If you go to Best Buy or or Circuit City you'll find they have "Music CD-Rs". These are usually 2-3 times as much as a normal data grade CD-R. They have some pre-pressed data in them that indicated that they are Music CD-Rs. Although your computer CDR burner doesn't care which one you use a stand alone CD-Recorder (such as the ones sold buy Phillips, or Pioneer) will only work with the "Music CDR's".
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a bogus news story about taxing blank digital media. It was born out of my blinding frustration that, in what should be a conspicuous, informed public debate, all the wrong people are being listened to.
I had no idea I was predicting the future.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Look at the historical precident in this country for laissez-faire capitalism. We gave rise to the Captains of Industry, Aka the "Robber Barons". Do we really want to repeat those dark days when deregulation was big?
Given a choice between being abused a large, inefficient government that I have the hope of participating in, versus being abused by the efficiency of corporation where votes are bought by dollars, I'll take government any day.
Deregulating an industry does not limit govt payouts, nor does it reconcile the fact that the average American living at the poverty line pays a higher percentage in taxes than your average corporation (average corporations pay between 2%-6%. How much do you pay?).
The corporate welfare structure in the United States is primarily the result of a mush-headed reverse-progressive (regressive?) tax scale that favors large corporation over the small businesses that are the real support for communities.
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
And now Bertelsmann wants free money.
Well, if I'm going to be paying for the right to copy music, then morally there is nothing wrong with hitting Napster and leeching away, since I've already paid for the right to do it. This completely removes any moral imperative to respect copyright laws or to ever go buy the CD of an artist that you actually like.
The US gov't does not, and never has, collected any "taxes" that are distributed to artists as royalties. Period, end of story.
Makers of Music Minidisc, DAT Music Tapes, and Music CD-R discs for sale in the US do throw money into the music industry, but it's the same corporate channels that already existed for music royalties.
Sorry, but your information is eight years out of date. Read Title 17 Chapter 10 if you don't believe me.
Since 1992, the U.S. Government has collected a royalty on all blank digital audio recorders and blank digital audio media manufactured in or imported into the United States, and handed the money directly over to the RIAA companies.
The money collected is, as mandated by federal law, divided as follows:
(1.75%) of the royalties are paid to the American Federation of Musicians, to be paid to "non-featured" musicians (studio musicians)
(0.92%) of the royalties are paid to the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, to be paid to "non-featured" vocalists (backup vocalists)
(25.60%) of the royalties are paid to "featured recording artists", including such bands as Metallica.
(38.40%) of the royalties are paid to "copyright owners" (the RIAA companies)
(16.67%) of the royalties are paid to "music publishers"
(16.67%) of the royalties are paid to music writers, including such bands as Metallica who write their own songs.
This is completely above and beyond the other systems of royalty payments, such as ASCAP, BMI, where the copyright owners go after businesses to get them to sign licensing agreements. In this case, the royalty fee collection system is part of Federal Law.
Incidently, if you're curious as to why downloading from Napster is not illegal, or immoral, read paragraph 1008. This is what you, the consumer got in exchange for a federal law mandating direct payments from your wallet to the RIAA whenever you buy a blank audio CDR.
IMO, Bertelsmann is a monopolist trying to grab as much of the media market as they can, especially in the book arena. They own the largest publishing company and the largest chain bookstore, Random House and Barnes & Noble. They attempted to purchase Ingram Book Company(big distributor-something like 60% of Amazon's books come from Ingram), luckily that was stopped by the antitrust folks in our govt. If they had pulled that off they would have had a complete vertical hold on the book industry - from publishing to distributing to bookselling. They would have profitted from the majority of internet book sales.
They are definitely a company /.ers should know about and be wary of.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
No matter what you say about these kind of tax policies, they are fairly common. What is even more sad is they arise out of a genuine concern and a desire to do what is right.
Haha.
The U.S. version of this law, the Audio Home Recording Act, was drafted by the recording industry with the specific goal of destroying the market for home digital audio recorders.
Do what is right, my ass.
There's not much Americans can say about this sort of thing. We keep voting for the same two parties, and when it gets down to it, we keep voting for the candidate who spends the most on ads. (Okay, in all fairness, two-thirds of the electorate votes unthinkingly for their party, and the remaining third votes unthinkingly for whoever spends the most on ads. It's not like Machiavelli didn't warn us about this.)
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Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
No you don't. You might owe it to them. More likely, you owe it to someone else, or no one at all. If an unsigned garage band burns from CDR demos to send out to reviewers and fans, please explain how and why they owe money to some arbitrary record label who will use the money to promote some pop star. If I copy a CD published by media company A so that I can listen to it in my car, why does media company B get a cut of the CDR sales revenue?
If you're so against things being free, then why do you defend the media companies getting this unearned money for free?
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Lemme get this straight.. I pay $7.50 for $4 of CD-R at the local CompUSA, three-fifty goes to the 'tax'. If I use them to pirate some big name band, the band makes more money than if I had bought the CD?
Pirate away boys! It seems it's the only way to support the artist!
.sig: Now legally binding!
I'd start tossing things out if I was forced to pay taxes to corporations. Didn't something like this happen in the 1700's?
Yeah, yeah, there was the American Revolution in the 1770's which freed America, but that was against the British, they only had to learn the lesson once, one war, and they were gone.
The Germans have to be reminded every few decades, or they get upppity again.
The government often does something like this, in order to compensate the "losers" during a time of drastic change in the economy. The hard part is making sure that the level of compensation is appropriate, and that small-scale victims (independent book publishers, for example) are treated fairly alongside the mega-corporations who are able to pay a lobbyist to keep within arm's length of legislators at all times.
If done correctly, this could actually help the publishing firms move their business in a new direction, by encouraging (financially) their participation in the New Economy.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
This would be similar to saying that it's OK to steal towles from a hotel room, since part of the rates you pay are to cover stolen towles.
Only on Saturday, I was reading an opinion piece in MCV, the UK trade magazine for the gaming/interactive entertainment trade, in which someone high up in a games development company was calling for a £30 levy on every CDR, at the factory, simply because it could potentially be used to pirate software.
I guess this is outrageous to all of us - sure it would probably stop the piracy of PC and PSX games in its tracks -- but it would also prevent me from (say) backing up the digital photos I took on holiday, or burning audio CDRs of campfire songs I recorded onto minidisc a couple of months ago.
We need to be aware that those in charge of "content" are blinkered to this kind of legitimate use for storage media. We need to remind them that piracy isn't all it can be used for, else they will eventually persuade governments to go through with this kind of taxation.
NB: the same guy went on to say "without CDs, these people will use their hard disks. Tax those too."
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