Copyright law [LWN.net]

Copyright law

Posted Nov 13, 2020 12:54 UTC (Fri) by anton (subscriber, #25547)
In reply to: Copyright law by anselm
Parent article: The RIAA, GitHub, and youtube-dl

The surcharge is reality, and we also pay it on hard disks, printers and probably many other things. And your GEMA and our AKM gets the money (based on the theory that they represent all the authors, artists, etc.) and distributes some of it to its members.

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Copyright law

Posted Nov 13, 2020 14:48 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

AFAIR the GEMA surcharge on CD-ROM media applied to “audio-quality” CD-ROM blanks (which are otherwise identical to standard CD-ROM blanks). I don't think anyone uses these any longer.

Historically, CD-ROM blanks were not exclusively used for copyrighted music – when the idea was new, CD-ROMs were popular as backup media, for sharing family photographs with relatives or sending them off to be printed, etc., and people reasonably objected to having to pay GEMA for the privilege of storing their own stuff on their own CD-ROM blanks.

Copyright law

Posted Nov 13, 2020 17:07 UTC (Fri) by jem (subscriber, #24231) [Link]

I'm not German, but this Wikipedia article lists surcharges on DVD media, external hard drives, MP3 players, PCs, Mobile phones, set-top boxes, scanners and printers, etc.

This is a bureaucratic system, and unfair to users which don't use these products for storing copyrighted material. The system also doesn't make sense with dwindling prices per gigabyte on external media. If the charge is ~2 cents per gigabyte for CD-R, then, for the same price per byte, it ought to be 200 € for a 10 TB hard drive. How about 20000 € for some future 1 PB media? Should cloud storage also be affected?

The same system was also used in Finland until the end of 2014, at which point it was abandoned completely.