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terrible 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.
Can you just buy from another European country and import? German customs are pretty rubbish at catching such things from my understanding. AFAIK you only get screwed on retail purchases.
I'd be willing to pay even more than that if some of it went to public financing of cultural projects that have little commercial viability, such as art films, public space art, preservation of traditional music…
They all need to start pirating. Their government is giving them carte blanche.
Meh, I guess I'm fine with it, they probably just updated it to reflect higher capacities of flash storage. I believe in Italy we have something of the order of 10 cents per CD, so a little more than 10 times that for something that can be rewritten and has a 100 the capacity doesn't seem like a 2000% hike (terrible choice of units if you ask me, they could have said 20 times more). I'd be willing to pay even more th…
They all need to start pirating. Their government is giving them carte blanche.
I'm from other European country but similar things happen here. I disagree with you here. We should register ourselves as content creators and get our money back in other legal ways. We should demonstrate how much those taxes are stupid.
It is not "You Are All Pirates" tax - this tax allows me to legally make a copy of a work of art for my private use, even if I didn't pay for the original - it is enough that the work of art was already presented in the public [for example, song in a radio, movie in the TV or theatre, etc]. So I can legally have that stored on my HDD, if I choose so. For that, I have to pay the tax, and I am ok with that.
All of the comments here seem vehemently opposed to the levy mentioned in the article but if it came with an extension of our rights to non-commercially copy and share works then I think that it would be a very fair trade. I would even be relatively unopposed if this was applied to bandwidth usage. Technologically speaking, there's no reason that a person shouldn't be able to go online and check out almost any song, movie, book, or television show in existence. Many, many people are aware of this and with good reason feel that it should be the case. The barrier to this is in the quagmire of licensing that is exemplified by what we've seen go on with Showtime, HBO, and Netflix.
Imagine if the government would stand up and say that universal access to art, literature, and educational materials is important enough that the laws need to be changed to facilitate it. If non-commercial exchange of copyrighted materials was legalized but in exchange bandwidth was taxed and the money paid out as royalties to rights holders based on torrent activity or something of the sort. To me, that sounds like a better alternative than having a country full of criminals. I'll keep dreaming.
But the real Problem here is (as almost always when it comes to digital rights) the GEMA. They are the reason why Youtube is almost not usable in Germany (unless you are using some sort of proxying), and that's just the tip of the iceberg as far as I am concerned. Being a former musician myself, I can guarantee that any dealing with the GEMA is nothing short of a PITA. Not only for musicians, but for event managers, shop owners and so on. Their fees are ridiculously high and getting worse each year while their payout to musicians is nothing short of a joke.
Their methods resolve to scaremongering and FUD. They are right up there with the german GEZ, but don't even get me started on those guys.
[1] http://www.heise.de/resale/meldung/ZPUe-erhoeht-Abgaben-auf-... [GERMAN]
They all need to start pirating. Their government is giving them carte blanche.
I'm from other European country but similar things happen here. I disagree with you here. We should register ourselves as content creators and get our money back in other legal ways. We should demonstrate how much those taxes are stupid.