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Spain Adds 'Copyright Tax' to Blank Media
Poker Forums writes "Just read on Zeropaid that Spain has recently voted in compulsory copyright licensing, levying a tax on all blank media. This includes cd-r, dvd-r, flash media, printers, scanners, cell phones, everything. The tax will be collected by the government and 'given to the copyright holder.'"
... given to a my ass...
The tax will be charged indiscriminately to manufacturers who, according to SGAE (our particular RIAA), are the ones taking advantage of all this """illegal""" copying (private copying for personal use with no money involved is still legal in Spain), and will mostly be given to this same organization. Problem is manufacturers are gonna pass the tax on to customers, and so the cycle of life closes.
And SGAE, of course, will use the money not to pay the authors, but to spread the word through adoctrination lectures, or to pay for lobbies to bully Brussels, or to cry louder about how bad people is and how poor authors are getting (despite SGAE's doubling benefits every year...).
The one improvement of this law is that now the tax has to be proportional to the cost of the medium; currently when we buy a DVD+R, the tax is higher than the price of the DVD itself... And stupidity didn't get to add DSL and Cable lines to the list, though they were in the top 10...
The title should read "Spanish politicians surrender to stupidity" (which wouldn't be so new, either), or sth similar...
My 0.02 cents
They just legalized copyright infringement.
...and misdirect the funds. That's what they do. Does it really matter which scumbag gets the money though? Politicians or "copyright holders".
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
open source and fsf and gnu? If someone buys soem cdr's and burn copies of free software, who gets paid?
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
Okay, if laws are in place to fairly compensate the copyright owners by taxing recordable media the offshoot of that should be continued "enjoyment" of what we've come to know as fair use. Ostensibly this tax should cover disbursements back to the artists for any copying and/or sharing consumers do.
A question from The Fine Article: "Is this an example of what is to come in the United States or other parts of Europe?", isn't this already a tax in place on recordable media in the United States? I seem to remember that a while back, or was it Canada?
Regardless, the entertainment industry can't have it both ways, they either tax in advance and anticipation of our "abuses", or they implement draconian DRM. Unfortunately it's looking like they're getting both.
So, who determines which copyright holders get what, and how much they get? Seems to me this is a system just ripe for abuse, with minimal controls on the right money getting to the right people... ... and, in other, no-way related news, I released a couple of songs I sung myself last year, and while I am a crappy singer/writer, I believe someone in Spain may be listening to my songs right now, and burning them and distributing them to their friends.
Can I have my check now, please?
One of these days i'm going to find this 'peer' guy and reset HIS connection!
To be able to manipulate governments so they force your business model to work.
I guess thats my problem I sell things if people don't buy them I have to do something else I never considered wrecking everyone else life so mine could be a little better
So that will make it legal to burn any media to CD/DVD as you are paying the copyright holder?....
Does this mean you can circumvent any DRM or other technical measures to protect the material on other media / files to burn them since you have paid this tax?....
Do I get tax back if I end up burning a coaster?....
Can you easily get tax back if its material you own the copyright to that you are burning?....
Does this include Software products and movie DVD rips and if so are you going to have to tell the media supplier what you intend to make copies of?....
Thought Not.
More accurate question might be:
Is this yet another revenue stream (on top of all the others) for someone somewhere who feels that their profits are not what they could be, and another kick to the teeth of fair use (If that exists in Spain)?
Yes.
Either prosecute people for copyright infringement (regardless how insane the laws surrounding that are) or leave the blank media alone. - By the way shouldn't the tax be on paper not Printers? after all the paper is the media. Mobile phones? Are they going to pay the copyright holders of the text messages I receive too?
If this is true then this is madness, and needs to be challenged before it spreads.
If your business model can't survive, get the government to legislates mandatory taxes that get passed onto you. I believe this concept is called either Communism (or similiar controlled economy) or Welfare. I don't know which.
I would have people make copies of my photos/minor_software_project/whatever on CD-R and then sue the Spanish RIAA if they don't send me my portion of payments. It's really odd that they represent ALL copyright holders. Like they represent ALL musicians, even the ones not signed up with RIAA companies. This RIAA racket has to be taken on and bought down in flames like the Hindenburg one day.
In other words, their artists' profits are increasing faster than theirs. No wonder Spain needed a new tax!
It's worth pointing out, however, that this kind of infringement is a big thing in Spain. In the area I saw, it was so ingrained that they called it 'top manta' (manta == sheet), named after the sheet that the street-sellers of usually pirated music use, so that if the police come along, they can grab the four corners of the sheet, bundle the music into it instantly, and disappear.
I go through mountains of CDs and DVDs to back up files. I've never in my life downloaded any copyrighted music or software. If I was in Spain I'd be required to help pay for people illegally downloading? Why not send me a traffic ticket every month because some people speed?
Following history, revolutions and revolts, society usually seems to get to a certian point before collectivley it gets sick of tax burdons, restrictions on speech and creativity and then either a revolt or a revolution is staged.
In a digital age where we are dealing with Intellectual Property, digitial censorship and hidden taxes it makes me wonder just what excatly a revolt or revolution against it would be like?
I can't imagine thousands of people marching through the streets finding government officals and decapating them, but you would think we will eventually get to a point where everything just gets too much.
We are now in the 21st century and are beginning to see the downsides of all the technology we have adopted, in the late 90's it was promosing, now we are seeing new emerging ways to control us, deny us of fundamental rights and governements seem to be finding new ways to write laws and profit from it.
As a canadian who pays a similar tax on media, I have to disagree with your assesment.
This tax is one step further *away* from loosing your right to copy audio files. A step away from legally protected DRM.
And if you don't like the tax, buy harddrives. They are cheap, less likely to fail, and a lot easier to use. I have 30 movies and 8 *seasons* of television shows on one of my harddrives. Heck I'm too lazy to convert movies to XVID, I just dump them out raw. I have a flash based mp3 player and I set the auto-play options for audio cd's on my PC to just rip the thing. I view CDs/DVDs as an incovenince I am glad to be rid of.
Considering the pending obsolecence of shiny platic disks, this seems like a good thing for Spain. Enjoy the freedom to do what you want with your data while you have it.
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why is it the government's job to compensate artists for lossed due to illegal activity?
i work in a grocery store, do we get compensated every time some asshole runs out the door with a carriage full of meat and seafood? no of course not. does best buy get compensated by the government if someone jacks a trailer full of electronic gear? no.
what makes the music industry so special?
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I am also a spaniard (too lazy to register, sorry) and I want to add that there are some things that the TFA doesn't mention:
The new LPI (Ley de Propiedad Intelectual == Intelectual Property Law) establishes a tax over any device capable of holding media (audio or video), such as CD-Rs, DVD-Rs, videotapes... but also iPods and pendrives. The preliminary draft of the law also included a tax over HDs but this was removed from the final draft due to outcry from computer distributors.
On the other hand, the old LPI (from 1996) forbade the copy of copyrighted content for redistribution to other people, but didn't mention anything about DRM. There was a legal item called "private copy", meaning that you can do one (and only one) copy of your copyrighted content for private use as a backup. Now, according to the new law, not only is specifically illegal to override any DRM scheme: the law also makes illegal the POSSESSION of any program intended for override DRM, such a DVD ripper, or any hardware intended for overriding other 'electronic countermeasures'.
Many people say that there is a patent contradiction here, since you are paying for a right that you can't actually use.
Previously, the rationale behind the tax was this 'private copy'. Now, the rationale is to compensate for the losses that the recording companies have when you copy content from one media to another: for example, since you can copy your old videotape movie to a DVD, you are not buying a DVD for a movie you already have; or you are not going to buy a MP3 for your iPod of a song that you already have on CD-audio.
And, funny thing, we have been paying the tax long before the new law was approved.
At least now the tax is a percentage of the value of the blank media; according to the previous "canon" (law) the tax was a fixed amount of money that was about a quarter of the blank media value, but since the prices went down and the tax didn't, today the final price of a DVD is 60% tax.
Also, some people say that since the tax has been extended to CD-DVD burners, you end paying the tax twice-on the media and on the recorder.
And no, you can't get a refund if you use your CDs to burn non-copyrighted content. For example, the ministry of justice is paying tons of money to the SGAE (think of a fusion RIAA+MPAA+AAP) because a copy of all the judicial proceedings on every court have to be stored in 'electronic form' (CD-r).
The SGAE, the law's main supporter, says that the final draft is not enough since doesn't include taxes over internet connections, HDs , and "any other format capable of holding or transferring copyrighted content"
As a side note, one of the SGAE top execs, who also happened to be an artist years ago, had to run out of a rock festival recently because the public was throwing stones at him; this story was mentioned on all news sources in spain, but all of them falied to mention the ultimate reason for the people's hate towards the exec.
Since the SGAE represents *all* copyright holders and collects funds on their behalf, we should expect the FSF (as the copyright holder of vast amounts of GNU software) and Linus (as the primary copyright holder for Linux) to receive a proportion of that income.
And the SGAE can't easilydodge that responsibility either, because to do so would be to accept that much media gets used for things other than music and videos, and that therefore the tax should not apply to all media.
Can't have it both ways.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
17 USC, Chapter 10, Subchapter A, Section 1008 specifically states:
No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium, an analog recording device, or an analog recording medium, or based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings.
Section 1001 defines a "digital audio recording medium" to be:
any material object in a form commonly distributed for use by individuals, that is primarily marketed or most commonly used by consumers for the purpose of making digital audio copied recordings by use of a digital audio recording device.
In more common language, this refers to audio/music CD-R discs, which are made to work in digital audio recorders. These discs are different from the more common data CD-Rs, in that they contain special digital markings (standard data CD-Rs won't work in digital audio recorders). In addition, by law a royalty has been paid on this blank media. These royalty payments are in turn distributed to copyright holders (see Section 1006 of the law cited above). They usually cost slightly more than data CD-R discs, but they can be found for less than $0.50 each.
So go ahead, make copies onto music/audio CD-R discs, even give copies to your friends. You can do so legally and without any moral problems - you've paid for the right to do so. (And the RIAA fought for this law. Thanks, RIAA!)
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