This latest case has been brewing for some years, but it just goes to show that the world of royalty fees paid to the entertainment industry is getting weirder every day. At the same time when return-to-the-middle-ages style pillory punishments for copyright infringement are contemplated in Finland, a German Court of Appeals has ruled that it’s perfectly fine to be forced to pay copyright fees for a PC, some 12eur in this case. Beautiful. So not only is it the media and the CD/DVD-stations that are slapped with these fees but the PC, too. What’s next, speakers? Heck, why not mandate a copper and optical fiber-tax, too, since that material is often used to transmit music.
The whole thing has crossed the line to absurdity a long time ago. It’s analogous to being forced to pay road taxes to all other countries in the world since we could drive in, say, New Zealand, if we wanted to. Obviously this is not done because here on Planet Earth, it’d be considered ludicrous!
I wonder when paying all these surrogate fees will amount to legal justification for “illegal” music downloads, since the music has already been paid for in more than one way – because in the minds of people, that line has been crossed a long time ago.
