Computers sold in Germany will now carry a 16% tax and another $13, designed to compensate record labels, studios, producers, etc. for money supposedly lost due to file sharing.
The levy is the country’s attempt to comply with a European Union Directive dating back to 2001, which demands that copyright holders be given “fair compensation”.
“In essence, copyright is a temporary monopoly on creative work granted to the authors, publishers and distributors of such products. It is intended to compensate them for their efforts and encourage them to continue to create. Yet, the disintermediation brought on by digital technologies threatens to link author and public directly, cutting out traditional content brokers such as record companies or publishers.
This is the crux of the battle royal. Middlemen are attempting — in vain — to sustain their dying and increasingly parasitic industries and refusing to adapt and re-invent themselves. Everyone else watches in amazement and dismay the consequences of this grand folly: innovation is thwarted, consumers penalized, access to works of art, literature and research constrained.”
Story: Analysis: Germany’s copyright levy
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