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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.
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.
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.
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