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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
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"
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
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.
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
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?
"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.