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German Court Sets Copyright Tax on New PCs
graemee pastes: "The District Court of Munich has ordered Fujitsu Siemens Computers to pay a copyright levy on new PCs. The landmark decision, announced on Thursday, ends a nearly two-year dispute between the largely Germany-based computer maker and the country's VG Wort rights society, which has sought compensation for digital copying. VG Wort had filed a suit against Germany's largest PC maker, Fujitsu Siemens, seeking 30 euro (US$41) for each new computer sold in the country. The court agreed to a 12 euro copyright levy."
... vomit in absolute disgust.
Unless of course this completely ligitimises copying c.f. Canada. somehow I doubt it though.
They're already paid for.
(Sure the courts wont see it that way)
~cederic
By doing this, they're legitimizing the same activities they claim to be trying to stop. If you are going to pass a levy to compensate for something, you can't expect anyone to listen when you tell them to stop. They will (rightly) say "I paid an extra tax on this equipment to cover the cost of what I'm doing." They'll either have to stop charging a levy or fin that no one will listen.
i am a soviet space shuttle
Do independent and alternative labels get any of the copyright taxes in countries like Germany and Canada, or does it all go to the RIAA equivalents?
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
You pay car tax and you're legally allowed to drive a car.
You pay tobacco tax and you're legally allowed to smoke it.
So if you pay a "digital copying tax" on a computer, you must be allowed to do digital copying on it, surely?
Out of curiosity, if you built a pc from scratch, which component gets this tax, or is it split up between all of them ?
I wonder how this will effect people who build their own PCs. Does the tax only apply to people who buy a pre-fab machine, or will individual components also be taxed, or is it on the honor system where if you build a computer at home you are obligated to send in the ammount required by the tax.
As assinine as this is overall, I would much rather pay a $50 tax on any computer than have the media industries completely destroy or cripple beyond recognition the internet and anything remotely interesting that computers can do.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
VG Wort is not about music. VG Wort is responsible for collecting money on written documents / books and the rights associated with them. And they are right about wanting to get that levy on computers, because people who want to set up Xerox machines and use them commercialy have had to pay that levy since, eh, always (And thereby you have the right to copy material out of books without owning the books).
So yes, you have to pay the levy, but you are also allowed to make non-commercial copies of books / magazines etc because of that. Stop complaining.
First they tax CD-R(W) media by default because they assume you will use them for copyright-protected content and now they're also making you pay an additional tax on computers because they assume you will illegally be using copyright-protected content on your computer. They just assume mens rea without proving it on an individual basis. Guilty until proven otherwise is the premise Germanic law is based on. The German legal system as well as all other modern legal systems are based on Roman law, which is based on the premise that you are innocent until proven guilty. How this decision could have come about is totally beyond me. What's next? An additional tax on eyeglasses because you might use them to view copyright-protected content?!
Just as a reminder, the four levels of mens rea set forth in the MPC (Model Penal Code) are:
I hate bureaucracy.
Tax this, tax that, distort the market.
VG Wort have increased the price of PCs to *everyone*. Over the whole of the economy, anyone who uses a PC to create a product or offer a service will now have to charge that much more - which means the entire economy is that much less productive, because there is a fixed amount of money available for investment, and the price of buying a PC based service is now higher.
What's more, the knock on effect is huge, because PCs are vital to so many industries. It will now be that much more expensive to buy *food*, because all the PCs bought by food retailers and wholesalers are that much more expensive; and we ALL buy food!
This sort of ruling, the very fact is can occur, is a hallmark of the danger of concentrating economic power in the hands of political power.
This court has both political power - the right to make decisions - and economic power - the right to make decisions which influence, in this case, a form of taxation.
When political decisions are badly made in the political sphere, the consequences are things like national ID cards, or foreign countries becoming upset with us.
When political decisions are badly made in the economic sphere, there is less choice of goods to buy, they cost more, and everyone, to a greater or lesser extent, becomes poorer.
--
Toby
By the way, if I remember correctly, Canada for one applies the levy also to hard disks (I'm not sure Germany does this). So Canadians already pay the IP tax on their computers.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
In Germany you need to pay copyright levies on virtually everything that would be suitable for creating copies, be it on CD/DVD writers, CD-R(W)/DVD-R(W) media, printers, etc. You would think that this copyright levy would entitle you to some fair use, such as private copies of, say, the latest audio cd you bought. And sure enough, even though the very people who get the money would like to abolish any notion of fair use and legal copies for private purposes, you may find that even now you are not allowed to make copies of things you paid for. Way too many audio CDs sold in Germany today have copy protections (I'd rather refer to them as play protections), and by law you may not attempt to overcome these protections, rendering any copy you make an illegal one.
I think this is really a fine display of greed. Make everyone pay but give nothing in return.
In Canada, there has been a copyright tax on blank CDs and on MP3 players. Well the supreme court of Canada just ruled these to be unconstitutional in Canada. Though the court has yet to rule on remidies, it is widely expected that refunds of the levy should be forthcoming. Hence statements in the press of late, that if you should decide to buy a media player in Canada, keep your receipt.
Since they can't seem to capture Whitey Bulger, the FBI has decideed to throw all US citizens in jail for three days instead.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
Not a small part. It's about 40% of the retail price.
Teosto also collects over 1 euro for every DVD-+R(W) disc. As a result a pack of 50 no-brand discs costs 129 euros here versus 25 euros when ordered from Estonia INCLUDING shipping. However, importing CDs and DVDs without paying the levies is illegal and carries insane penalties (fines over 20 euros for a single disc and even jail time).
And no, you can't legally download or copy CDs nor DVDs even though you have to pay the levies - there's absolutely NO way for a non-corporation to avoid paying the levy other than ordering from abroad, but like I said before that's illegal.
The reason for this insanity is partly the fact that the majority of Finns continue to vote for the same celebrities year after year, even after they raised their own already mind-boggling salaries by 60% and lowered their retirement age to 45 years while the country was suffering from record-high unemployment and new lay-offs were announced every week.
As my personal opinion I think only those with higher education should be allowed to vote and all goverment officials should not be paid more than the average salary.
Capitalization is the difference between "Helping your uncle jack off a horse" and "Helping your uncle Jack off a horse"
I can add some perspective as someone who has received funds from VG Wort, because after all, this is all about people like me, right? The whole point is to protect the rights of copyright holders and ensure that they are adequately compensated for their work. So is it really worth it?
I co-authored some long-since-forgotten academic articles and a book back in my days as a graduate student. The articles appeared in some conference proceedings, and the book, as well as a couple of the articels, were published in the Lecture Notes series of the Springer Verlag. So my name got put on a list somewhere, and every year for about three or four years, a check from VG Wort came in the mail.
To put it briefly, I could have just as well done without it. I don't know how they determined how much money was dispersed to each individual, it was based on some formula that I never bothered to try to understand. At any rate, it was nothing to get rich on, maybe about a hundred marks or so if I remember correctly (this was back before the Euro). About enough to take a girl out on a nice dinner date, once a year. Which of course is nothing to sneeze at, especially if you're a student hustling to make ends meet and struggling for ways to impress a girl. But I could have just as well managed without it. (If she's worth it, you always find a way, you know; and one nice dinner in a year won't get you very far.)
More prolific authors get more money from VG Wort, since the money is based on how much you've published. But I doubt that the cash from VG Wort makes a whole lot of difference to people who make their living as authors; they have to get the vast part of their income by other means.
So if this is the benefit to society that is to be gained by making everyone pay an extra 12 Euros for each PC, I think it's obvious that we can just as well pass it up. Aside from all the philosophical debates about copyright law and whether it's fair and just to pay creators of content this way, the practical effects of the scheme are just not very significant. Why put this added burden on the buyers of PCs just so some student can take someone out once a year? It's better for everyone, economically and socially, to keep the prices of computer hardware down than to extend this meager benefit to copyright holders.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
The VG Wort is also the reason why scanners, printers and copy machines often are slower in Germany than in the rest of the world.
The VG Wort gets a fee based on the throughput of these machines. To lower this fee, many devices sold in Germany are (or were?) sold with reduced speed.
Sometimes you could speed up peripherals by installing english drivers.
Sounds like a wonderful little protection racket. You pay into the syndicate^wsystem so in the off chance something "bad" bappens to you, you can get help.
And refusing to pay for this "insurance" will no doubt greatly increase the odds of something "bad" happening to you.
Where can I get a piece of this action?
The important legal difference is that private copies are legal in Germany. Again: In Germany, I can take a DVD, CD, video, whatever, and rip a copy for my own private use. Of course, if I start distributing that copy or screen it in a public place etc. they get to throw the book at me, and will do so very, very hard.
This Recht auf eine Privatkopie is something German consumer groups have been fighting tooth and nail to keep in he face of massive industry pressure to adopt an American-style "sorry sucker, you can't do jack" system. On the long run, this new ruling will actually work for the consumer, because it weaves the right to a private copy tighter into the greater legal fabric. Now, when I buy a computer, I have paid for that private copy, so industry can just go shove a bratwurst up their Po, with mustard. Or they can try to get the VG Wort system changed -- and good luck with that, because it touches just about every scrap of printed matter in Germany, from newspapers to pornographic novels.
All the talk here about "guilty until proven innocent" is pure crap by people who haven't taken the time to read the background kindly provided by the Germans on the list and should be modded down as ranting, if not German-bashing.
As somebody who has lived in Germany for a while let me say that German law for the most part is a very sane, logical, and balanced system that almost across the board is superior to the 18th Century money-comes-first atavism that the U.S. is forced to suffer through. The SCO case proved this quite well: German courts took about a week to bitch-slap Darl's minions back into the real world, while, what is it now, years? later IBM and RedHat are still forced to pour millions into legal fees.
And people will ask questions about it. Then you explain it (in the FAQ or a brochure) and point people toward the government.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
You have noticed the oil cartels just raped us for hundreds of billions of extra bucks in the U.S.? And it had nothing to do with the government? At least the Europeans get less pollution, get smaller cars with better mileage, and use the taxes on gas for the public good? We in the U.S. gave trillions over to the oil industry -- which will then buy up more of our private sector, bribe the public sector, and make sure we never see a non-oil-based economy established. SUCH A DEAL.
Don't worry. It just means that non-oil economy won't start in the US. US will be forced to follow, though. The oil megacorps will kick and scream while being dragged off the scene, maybe buy few more years of life, but that's about all they will be able to do.
Same like stem cell research. If the clerofascists ban/restrict it in the US, it only means Korea will become the biomed leader.
The world is too big to allow a comparatively small group to stop the progress. Slow down, perhaps - but not stop.
"Has anyone tried defending an infringement suit on the theory that they paid a copyright levy on the media and thus paid for making the copy?"
- Paid-Them? argument :( Although it makes my skin crawl.
I believe they got the law giving them lovely money to compensate them for the FAIR-USE copies.
A beautiful, nasty, WRONG argument, because a copyright holder is not entitled to compensation for Fair Use copying. That's WHY it's called Fair Use: because it is fair for the user to copy without paying.
But it sidetracks the whole Why-Am-I-Being-Sued-For-Copying-When-I've-Already
That's why word meanings are important! You can't let your foe own the win by redefining the terms used in your arguments so that you can't even make yourself understood in the debate. Orwell made this clear. L. Ron Hubbard used word redefinitions (Win, Enemy, etc) in his writings to redefine how his followers thought when certain key words were used, making argument with his ideas impossible. Redefinitions of the word "pirate" and "thief" to describe copying intangibles was intentional on the **AA's part. Bush's PR people reconstituted the simple idea of the word "torture" into the less objectionable "abuse" in the news media. It's all about the words. If your opponent removes your ability to express yourself in words understandable by a third party, you've lost.