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Vendors Sue Dutch Government Over Media Levies
An anonymous reader writes with news that hardware vendors aren't too happy about expanded levies on media. From the article: "Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Dell, and Imation are suing the Dutch government over new levies on hard disks, smartphones, tablets, and MP3 players that are meant to compensate the music and movie industries for losses caused by home copying. The entertainment industry estimates lost income of €40 million, which is much too high, according to the hardware companies. 'That amount is excessive and completely unfounded,' they said. The €40 million also incorporates damages for illegally downloaded music and movies which, according to the companies, legally cannot be recovered by a levy on devices. Furthermore the Dutch government established a levy on all devices including devices for professional use that are not used for private copying, they said."
In the US the entertainment industry attributes losses of more 40 million to a single file-sharer.
Many people in the Netherlands now buy their electronics in Germany, where it's much cheaper thanks to less tax and the absence of this ridiculous levy.
-- Cheers!
According to the article:
Presently, the Dutch see downloading and copying movies and music for personal use as “fair use” and not punishable by law.
I wouldn't mind paying an additional $2 for an MP3 player if it made all the ridiculous RIAA / MPAA lawsuits go away.
It is a ridiculous levy as you pay for your right to make home copies of the media you own. But really it is just a way to get money in the pockets of the entertainment industry that are the recipients of what is collected through these "Auvibel" taxes. Here in Belgium it was the works of Fientje Moerman of the liberal party OpenVLD that started this shenigans with their auvibel taxes. OpenVLD has a lot of ties with the entertainment industry or media in its whole.
... ) or people selling blank media on ebay with lawsuits for tax evasion, etc.
You pay for example 50 eurocent of taxes on an empty DVD. But 99% of the DVD productions are protected by anti copying measures. It is is illegal by Belgian law to circumvent those measures so in reality you can't execute that right which you pay for and that goes into the pockets of the entertainment industry...
When they started those taxes justice went in high gear (as a victim of abuse I can tell you that for other cases they aren't that fast... ) and threatened every single shop (even in our neighboring countries for example as a Belgian it is impossible to order blank media in the UK, germany,
In the end they totally destroyed the industry or sales of blank media in this country and a lot of people bought external hard drives that didn't had those taxes at the time. Now you pay on a HDD or usb stick larget then 1GB, 9 euro's / 11 dollars.
And the levies go to the artists of course. A whole 0% of them. Yup, the artists are totally taken care of.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
Fuck these guys.
The media companies do NOT compensate artists with any of the money collected, so their principal reason for getting this money is invalid.
As for their lost profits, study after study proves that file-copying actually increases their sales.
Screw them, we need to get rid of these leeches.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Actually, Stichting BREIN is a different kind of evil.
Although it's difficult to say which is more bad, I'm inclined to say that the RIAA is certainly worse.
Whereas the RIAA will happily target individuals and use their techniques to coerce people into paying a settlement fine rather than going through lengthy and very expensive litigation - and generally having the defendant end up paying great multiples of the settlement amounts... ...Stichting BREIN tends to target the entry points to distribution. I.e. TPB and various other torrent (indexing) sites, MasterNZB and various other usenet (indexing) sites.
The reason it's difficult to say which is worse is that while the RIAA goes after dead people, old grannies without computers, cats, etc. they do tend to 'only' target those people and there's no great erosion of fundamental concepts of copyright and the internet.
Stichting BREIN, on the other hand, has successfully managed to get courts to force ISPs to block sites, in one case even being allowed to add IPs to the list and the ISP must add those to the block list (though they can contest it if they feel the adding of an IP address is in err), has successfully managed to expand things from direct copyright infringement to the 'facilitating' argument (and continues to expand that), can happily get government officials to come along with them on 'raids' (no court order) making those they're raiding feel like they really have little choice but to allow e.g. computers to be taken, etc.
That said, BREIN isn't really the one to be targeting in this case. They just tend to catch the most flak (for the reasons outlined above). Stichting de Thuiskopie, SONT and Buma/Stemra (on the side of wanting levies) and STOBI (on the side of blank media producers/etc.) are the main players here , along with then-minister Fred Teeven for actually getting things signed into law a long time ago (an zero Euro levy, which formed the bridge to making it a non-zero Euro levy - whereas going directly for a non-zero Euro levy would have met with great resistance).
I'm not so sure about that. A song is maybe 4 MB. According to this article with proper storage mechanisms, you can store about 500,000 bytes on a single sheet of paper using a 600 dpi printer. And that's just using black and white. Add in support for multiple colors and you could probably easily encode most MP3 files on a page or two. Even without color, you could fit a 4 MB song on 8 pages. Not a single page, but hardly a box.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Now the fight isn't about consumers against the RIAA & MIAA, but other corporations are starting to feel the pinch of the bullshit that the RIAA and MIAA have been representing.
This is good, because sooner or later it will hopefully wake up everyone to that fact that the RIAA and MIAA need a new business model, one that doesn't involve suing consumers.
Be seeing you...