Slap on the SGAE

This text is an article published in the newspaper Expansion and can be read in pdf here

Now is the expected day when all who are against the digital canon, the tax applies to the purchase of all equipment, materials and recording media and digital reproduction, we're in luck. The Court of Justice European Union has ruled that the fee can be charged only individuals, but not legal persons, so that companies and governments need to be exempted.

It is a first step in a long struggle in the field of copyright, by thousands of people who have always believed that this charge was not only abusive, but also premised on the assumption that the default user would make a inappropriate use of the storage devices and, therefore, have to pay for it proactively. This special tax levied, for example, video cameras at a cost of 6.61 euros per unit, each CD and DVD sold in Spain at a cost between 0.17 and 0.60 euros each to mobile phones with 1, 10 euros, regardless of use to be given once purchased.

This amount goes directly to swell the accounts of the SGAE, AIE, and AGEDI, which distributes between authors and publishers as compensation for the rights to disseminate their works, which supposedly could be being played in these media without author's permission.

This is called "right of remuneration for compulsory collective management." I do not dispute that a fee is required, much less, that we should safeguard the rights of authors and publishers, but the way it is done through the digital canon.

The international trend is to create a fee and, in fact, 22 of the 27 European Union countries already do. What does not make sense is that it indiscriminately and applies to any person and preventive activity. The fee digitalsupusounosingresosdeunos100 million last year to management entities (27 million for the SGAE), undoubtedly a substantial income.

Currently, this tax is used by several associations, contentious - administrative proceedings before the National Court, and is now opening a battlefield in Europe that begins to clear doubts in favor of collective struggle against this fee.

The systematic confrontation between the Internet and SGAE began with this rate and, perhaps, is that why ael SGAE was found in a survey of more than four thousand Internet users, an entity with poor consideration by the Spanish , since historically fell annually in the Ministry of Finance.

We are in the middle of a struggle that will continue and possibly longer, but for the thousands of people we are fighting for a fairer rate without our point as possible offenders proactively, this slap on the wrist and it seems Brussels the advance of an expected victory

Tags: digital canon , tax digital downloads , SGAE