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In France the tax on storage media (Including SSD, DVD-R, smartphones themselves, SD cards, everything) is officially a way to compensate rights holders for the

In France the tax on storage media (Including SSD, DVD-R, smartphones themselves, SD cards, everything) is officially a way to compensate rights holders for the legal right to make private copies (usable only with close family and relatives). The idea is that the private copy exemption is lowering sales, and this tax balance these sales. Doesn’t make a lot of sense (who was buying several copies of the same vinyl or book?) but that’s the letter of the law. Of course it’s at the same time illegal to break DRM so you are entitled to rip DVDs /bluray to your computer for convenience but it’s illegal to do it with most disc because you would need to break the DRM. So, the tax officially doesn’t aim at compensating piracy. It’s a legal technicality because yes, the initial spirit was to levy a tax on illegal copying, but without encouraging it (“I already paid!”) or creating a global licence.

qwerty456127 7y ago
> In France the tax on storage media (Including SSD, DVD-R, smartphones themselves, SD cards, everything) is officially a way to compensate rights holders for the legal right to make private copies (usable only with close family and relatives). Why are you meant to compensate anybody for your rights? Why not compensate potential robbers for outlawing robberies then? They could be more rich and happy if the law didn't acknowledge your right for physical safety and private property protection.
- phicoh 7y ago
  The way it works in Europe, is that copyright is implicit: you create something, you get copyright. With copyright you get to control who can copy your work. Copyright is more seen as a natural right then as a law that has an economic purpose. Then there are a number of exceptions where blanket permission to copy is granted in return for some financial compensation for the creators. Where all of this goes wrong is that there is not a clear legal framework how creators should receive money and especially how much they should get. As somebody buying blank media, how the creators are compensated is not really an issue, but the total amount of money that gets collected is. In particular, the money is meant to compensate for legal copies under the relavant section of the copyright law. For example, essentially nobody makes legal copies of copyrighted material to DVD-R. You cannot legally copy DVDs, so the money should compensate for music files, analog video tapes, televsion, scans of paper books, etc. That happens so little that there should not be an additional tax in DVD-R

qwerty456127 7y ago

> In France the tax on storage media (Including SSD, DVD-R, smartphones themselves, SD cards, everything) is officially a way to compensate rights holders for the legal right to make private copies (usable only with close family and relatives). Why are you meant to compensate anybody for your rights? Why not compensate potential robbers for outlawing robberies then? They could be more rich and happy if the law didn't acknowledge your right for physical safety and private property protection.

phicoh 7y ago
The way it works in Europe, is that copyright is implicit: you create something, you get copyright. With copyright you get to control who can copy your work. Copyright is more seen as a natural right then as a law that has an economic purpose. Then there are a number of exceptions where blanket permission to copy is granted in return for some financial compensation for the creators. Where all of this goes wrong is that there is not a clear legal framework how creators should receive money and especially how much they should get. As somebody buying blank media, how the creators are compensated is not really an issue, but the total amount of money that gets collected is. In particular, the money is meant to compensate for legal copies under the relavant section of the copyright law. For example, essentially nobody makes legal copies of copyrighted material to DVD-R. You cannot legally copy DVDs, so the money should compensate for music files, analog video tapes, televsion, scans of paper books, etc. That happens so little that there should not be an additional tax in DVD-R