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Comment by rsto | Hacker News Reader

European Copyright legislative is an inconsistent mess.

Right now, in Austria, the government is up to demand 6% of the price of any digital storage device, to compensate copyright holders when the legit consumers of their work execute their right to make a private copy.

So the European Court apparently just has settled that in one country of the EU, consumers do not have the right to make private copies, while in others consumers just got a new tax to do so. AFAIK the Austrian model follows German legislative.

What a mess.

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From the linked text.

The government's choices are now to remove the private copying exception—making personal copying illegal again, or to supply additional evidence that copyright owners suffer no or minimal “harm” from personal copying, or else to begin imposing a new tax on users to compensate the industry for that “harm”.

Which sounds to me like UK has the option to start collecting a similar surcharge to compensate for the right to make private copies of works. They are not required to ban private copying completely.

Thanks, I read the article but this sentence must have slipped my attention. I really would like to see them to supply evidence that copyright owners suffer no or minimal harm from personal copying but guess they won't even bother attempting.

Well, the levy is the least of their problems

In Germany there's the issue of GEMA and the draconian policies. Also users of bittorrent are fined liberally

Same in France, except that it is so high that CDs are ~10x the price of the ones in Germany (literally) so everyone is buying their CDs in Germany instead (or any other country, even the UK has cheaper CDs). Copy related taxes per country in europe: http://static.pcinpact.com/images/bd/news/120599.png (In French but easily understandable)

Is that blank recordable CDs or actual music CDs?

It's blank CDs and DVDs only, on this chart the tax is 35ct per CD and 1€ per DVD which seems about right.

The article is about a decision of the UK High Court, not the European Court of Justice, so it only applies to the UK.

Yeah, I am also not happy with the choice of words here. The reason for it seems to be that, while the court in question is national, the legislation which it cites as the base for its decision is European.

In Portugal a similar law will start to be applied from July on. Most storage devices will see an increase in the price so that "copyright holders" can be paid, when what you just want is to store your own photos. ridiculous.

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