[wilhelmtux-discussion] Re: Charges on empty CD-R(W) media..

[ribnitz at linuxbourg.ch]

Hello Claude, hi list..

what Andreas Wegelin of SUISA wrote in short is the following:

- there are currently no plans or provisions to reimburse the 6 cents per hour
of playing time (or 525 MB).

- With fixing this 'fee' to 6 cents, it was calculated that about half of the
meda will be used in pme's (small- to medium-sized enterprises) and offices for
legitimate purposes. The fee on cd-r-audio is at 33 cents/hour. The fee has to
be paid regardless of the intended use.

tobias Gasser sees two ways:

a) leave it as it is, hardly an option, imo
b) create a new "Verwertungsgesellschaft", exclusively for Software/Data, and a
way to register with them as an autohr of this software. This would leat to an
augmentation of those fees, according to thomas, and could be quite a long-term
project (lobbying, and such).

On the upside, there's 1 mp3 track per 25 cds.


my personal opinion:

- I think the percentage of 50% 'legitimate use' is too low. In the PME's I see,
almost all CD-R's are used to store documents, and very few of them are used to
copy audio tracks.

- This fee is paid regardless of use. Yet there's no way (at the moment) that I
can register as the 'Copyright holder'/'owner' of a certain work (we are
talking about 'data' here, not sculpures, or audio/video material. The
comparison with 'print' is also somewhat awkward). So there's no way for me to
get reimbursement for (eg. an electronic text) a work I did. For this reason I
think this fee should be abolished, or there needs to be a way people can
'register' their autorship.

We therefore need to start informing interest groups, and form a lobby to get
this through.

Claude: I think that link you gave more or less expresses what we should strive
for, albeit as a long-term goal.

Hope to have helped

robert