Germany Increases 'You Are All Pirates' Tax On Solid State Media By 2000%
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Re: Germany Increases 'You Are All Pirates' Tax On Solid State Media By 2000%
#2EDIT: I was wrong.
Your diatribes would be much more effective if they either had a bit more research behind them or did not succumb to poe's law. - saulrh
Good critique, thanks.
Re: Germany Increases 'You Are All Pirates' Tax On Solid State Media By 2000%
#3terrible link bait by the techdirt junk site. flagged, see below for my explanation.
it is not a piracy tax. Germans have a right to copy stuff for their close friends. that's not piracy but a lawful right. that the fee is outrageous is another issue.
Re: Germany Increases 'You Are All Pirates' Tax On Solid State Media By 2000%
#4EDIT: I was wrong. Your diatribes would be much more effective if they either had a bit more research behind them or did not succumb to poe's law. - saulrh Good critique, thanks. - http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Poes_Law
First of all, a levy on storage media? That is so weird!
How the hell did that come about?
Your diatribes would be much more effective if they either had a bit more research behind them or did not succumb to poe's law.
Re: Germany Increases 'You Are All Pirates' Tax On Solid State Media By 2000%
#5terrible link bait by the techdirt junk site. flagged, see below for my explanation. it is not a piracy tax. Germans have a right to copy stuff for their close friends. that's not piracy but a lawful right. that the fee is outrageous is another issue.
That's piracy tax. Other countries have this.
It's called "fair use".
In general, and in fact I sort of believe it is also that way in Germany, not a law that allow you to copy stuff to your close friends.
It allows you to make copies for yourself (backups, etc), and to view/listen to those copies or the original with your family. NOT giving or copying it to them.
Anyway, since you're letting your family view/listen, etc. they lose money on "fair use". Thus they made a tax so you pay for it.
And you know what? That's piracy tax with any name. So the site might be crap, I don't know. Germany may or may not have this tax, I don't know.
I know some countries do. France certainly do. And calling it piracy tax is insightful. Its there because of the so-called piracy. It's just a way to steal money really.
Re: Germany Increases 'You Are All Pirates' Tax On Solid State Media By 2000%
#6EDIT: I was wrong. Your diatribes would be much more effective if they either had a bit more research behind them or did not succumb to poe's law. - saulrh Good critique, thanks. - http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Poes_Law
First, if you're not entirely sure about the article, relax a bit. The source of this weird site is a well-known and respected IT site, heise.de.
I'd ~translate~ ZPÜ as 'Central authority (Z) for private (P) rights to create copies (Ü)'. They are, for all I can tell, part of the 'GEMA' group, the German "We're responsible to collect money for artists whenever you run a radio/play music in a public place" guys.
These guys set a ~tax~ on anything you can use to create copies. Cd burner? Check. Hard drives? Check. Empty cds/dvds? Check. All of those, if bought here, are supposed to give a portion of their price to that organization. So I guess you can call it a tax on storage media if you want. Let's say it's a .. disputable thing.
The rest of the German article is well-written, reasonable and .. well .. IT biased, of course. They discuss that all manufacturers and traders are a tiny bit unhappy with this situation, but do expect to fight for the next years to correct that idiocy. Until then, prices are expected to be adjusted in Germany: They claim that the prices for a 8 GB SD card currently costs 6-15 EUR and now needs to factor in this ~tax~ of 1.95 EUR for the time being -> Prices for consumers go up.
Edit: To save a click on my profile: I'm German, so that's my native language.
Re: Germany Increases 'You Are All Pirates' Tax On Solid State Media By 2000%
#7EDIT: I was wrong. Your diatribes would be much more effective if they either had a bit more research behind them or did not succumb to poe's law. - saulrh Good critique, thanks. - http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Poes_Law
First of all, a levy on storage media? That is so weird! How the hell did that come about? Erm, multiple countries have levies like this. They, and increases in them, are for exactly what they say on the tin: the money is given to the recording industry to cover the expected cost of any piracy that occurs using that blank media. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy Your diatribes would be much more effec…
As aw3c2 mentioned, it is not officially intended to compensate for losses caused by illegal copying (that would be highly debatable juridically) but for the fact that it is legal to make a few copies for friends and for personal use. At least as long as there's no copy protection. Not much of a right when you have to collectively pay for the "free" personal copies anyway.
Re: Germany Increases 'You Are All Pirates' Tax On Solid State Media By 2000%
#8EDIT: I was wrong. Your diatribes would be much more effective if they either had a bit more research behind them or did not succumb to poe's law. - saulrh Good critique, thanks. - http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Poes_Law
German native speaker here.
Sadly the basic facts of the article are correct.
There is a levy on different media and also on machines capable of copying content (yes, there is a levy on computers in Germany). The height of the levy is negotiated with the producers of the product, represented by Bitcom, and the respective "Verwertungsgesellschaft" which in this case is the ZPÜ.
The "Verwertungsgesellschaft" negotiating the levy for (paper) copying machines would be the VG-Wort.
Negotiations for USB-Sticks failed, so the ZPÜ made a unilateral move and simply set the new levy to said price.
Bitcom states in the original article (on heise.de), that one part of the underlying law has not been properly respected, namely §54a, Absatz 4 which stated that the levy has to have a sane relation to the price of the media.
They are expecting a lengthy lawsuit with the adverse effect that the producers of sticks have to set aside some money for the case of losing. In addition to that they expect the european market to become skewed since there is no such levy in switzerland and other neighbouring countries where consumers can easily order sticks.
Re: Germany Increases 'You Are All Pirates' Tax On Solid State Media By 2000%
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
First of all, a levy on storage media? That is so weird! How the hell did that come about? Erm, multiple countries have levies like this. They, and increases in them, are for exactly what they say on the tin: the money is given to the recording industry to cover the expected cost of any piracy that occurs using that blank media. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy Your diatribes would be much more effec…
As aw3c2 mentioned, it is not officially intended to compensate for losses caused by illegal copying (that would be highly debatable juridically) but for the fact that it is legal to make a few copies for friends and for personal use. At least as long as there's no copy protection. Not much of a right when you have to collectively pay for the "free" personal copies anyway.
Sorry, replace "piracy" with "lost sales" in my post; even if we don't believe that, the recording industries certainly seem to.
Re: Germany Increases 'You Are All Pirates' Tax On Solid State Media By 2000%
#10EDIT: I was wrong. Your diatribes would be much more effective if they either had a bit more research behind them or did not succumb to poe's law. - saulrh Good critique, thanks. - http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Poes_Law
First, if you're not entirely sure about the article, relax a bit. The source of this weird site is a well-known and respected IT site, heise.de. I'd ~translate~ ZPÜ as 'Central authority (Z) for private (P) rights to create copies (Ü)'. They are, for all I can tell, part of the 'GEMA' group, the German "We're responsible to collect money for artists whenever you run a radio/play music in a public place" guys. These…
Yep, being german I can confirm that. This tax increase is just another proof that the german GEMA system is really broken. The other on is GEMA demanding payment from Kindergartens for singing childrens songs and printing the texts of these things out. And even if I'm to lacy to look up a link to that story, it really actually happened. Guess what? Nobody here did anything about it. With the next guy shouting "PIRACYYYYYY" all the discussion regarding this "single case" just went away. Just my 5 cents.
So I guess I'll be buying my storage in austria or france the next time. Maybe even amazon.co.uk works in this case...