As for your point about alternatives, if they add a tax on oxygen you breathe, will you also then say "it's not so bad if the alternative is you are not allowed to breathe at all"?
Backups are already legal in France. It’s pure greed. Why should we pay twice? Also this levy goes to major labels, why should I fund the local Taylor Swift if I want to backup my computer?
> blank media
But we still pay that levy on blank media, phones, tablets, computers, hard drives, and USB keys. They even wanted to put that tax on refurbished items.
> the alternative is that you are not allowed
But it was already legal for the past 50 years. They added this tax, it’s not a gift for us, it’s yet another restriction on what was previously legal.
The alternative is that we download torrents pretty much everywhere except Germany which developed a private industry of lawyers extracting money from leachers and seeders alike.
Germans instead have VPNs set up in Poland or Ukraine and use their streaming websites.
Refs:
https://doctorow.medium.com/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Copyleft_trolling
Easy money...
Those bands are not famous but despite making sales, they only get a few bucks every year, or it’s the SACEM saying "we forgot to send you the check lol, no biggies." It’s the biggest legal mafia I can think of right now.
Most of the money collected is sent to huge artists (like what Spotify is doing), there is nothing indie about it even if they pretend it’s for the glory of French music.
It's the same idea as to why reducing the amount of means-testing and other hoops to jump to get social benefits would save taxpayers money - sure, more people who don't need benefits would get them, but that's more than offset by what would be saved by eliminating the workload of (and government jobs dedicated to) gate-keeping those benefits.
That's of course not the only alternative. But the recording media levy isn't that bad at least in Finland. The income from those is distributed directly to authors and artists, skipping the labels and publishers altogether.