Apple raises iPhone, iPad prices in Germany to account for copyright levy
Apple raised iPhone and iPad pricing in Germany over the weekend to account for a new copyright levy agreement inked by tech industry importers and creative professionals in December.
Last month, Apple and other tech companies agreed to pay 5 to 7 euros ($5.50 to $7.70) per smartphone and tablet in a deal designed to benefit musicians, producers and other content producers. The Cupertino, Calif., company confirmed to the Associated Press on Sunday that the price hike is connected to Germany's new levies.
As it applies to Apple's product lineup, the price adjustment adds just under 6 euros to current iPhone models, while iPad prices jump about 7 euros.
According to the AP, money gained by the levies will be meted out to creative professionals, including "creators, producers and acting artists of erotic and pornographic films." The new levy is based on a 1965 German law granting consumers the right to make personal copies of sounds, images and text in exchange for a small fee applied to the purchase price of a new device, the report said.
German trade association Bitkom said in a statement last year that the treaty, which runs through 2018, incorporates back compensation for iPhones sold from 2008 and iPads sold from 2012.
Last month, Apple and other tech companies agreed to pay 5 to 7 euros ($5.50 to $7.70) per smartphone and tablet in a deal designed to benefit musicians, producers and other content producers. The Cupertino, Calif., company confirmed to the Associated Press on Sunday that the price hike is connected to Germany's new levies.
As it applies to Apple's product lineup, the price adjustment adds just under 6 euros to current iPhone models, while iPad prices jump about 7 euros.
According to the AP, money gained by the levies will be meted out to creative professionals, including "creators, producers and acting artists of erotic and pornographic films." The new levy is based on a 1965 German law granting consumers the right to make personal copies of sounds, images and text in exchange for a small fee applied to the purchase price of a new device, the report said.
German trade association Bitkom said in a statement last year that the treaty, which runs through 2018, incorporates back compensation for iPhones sold from 2008 and iPads sold from 2012.
Comments
And how does the government fairly distribute the funds raised? A whole bureaucracy has to be established, content owners and developers would have to be registered with the new authority, hardware sellers in Germany would have to be registered and a system established to collect the levy funds, and bureaucrats employed to decide how much producer X gets instead of producer Y. Meanwhile producer Z slips through the cracks and gets nothing. Of course after all that civil service massaging and long lunches the amount left would be token to the producer anyway.
Then there are the changes induced to consumer behaviour. Content consumers can regard themselves as having already paid for the content. Even though they are now charging you a second time for content you have already purchased, unofficial downloads are encouraged by this policy. Why pay a second time when actually accessing the content?
Bad policy would be a good summary.
What it really is is an attempted shakedown of the hardware companies. The legislators thought that companies like Apple would just absorb the cost, and no doubt most do. So good on Apple. The only thing it has done wrong is instead of just adding the levy into the price of the iPhone, it should have made the levy a separate line item on the list price and the invoice just for German purchasers, so they can see exactly what their government has done to them.
if the German government actually wanted to do something about illegal downloads, it could perhaps consider something old fashioned such as basic police work and enforcing the law. I guess that wouldn't be popular. They should have done absolutely nothing if hans blogmeister ripped his cd so he can listen to Aha on his iPhone. In fact, copyingfrom something like a CD you have purchased To your owned devices should be legal, like it is in other jurisdictions. Hans has after all already paid for it.
Other counties, including mine, regard ripping a CD you have purchased to listen on your own hardware is 'fair use' and don't try to charge a second time. The Australian Govenrment only gets antsy if you distribute the content to others.
As far as I know, porn in Deutschland is not considered an art form, although many films that are erotic in nature certainly are and have been so considered.
Your grammar lesson doesn't bear weight on that issue.
This was then extended to copiers (you could copy a book), then cd/dvd-recorders and blank cds/dvds (I don't know if we pay this levy on blank sheets of paper also
The same goes for hard disks and SSDs. What we see know is just and expansion of the ruling to popular devices that include some type of storage.
This ruling wasn't thought out by the government, they just let the industry squeeze some more euros from the consumers for no service in return.
When music and movies were sold on physical support, it was easy for association to collect money. Now that digital purchase is the main channel and streaming is the future, associations are collecting much less money (at least much less than they suppose to collect). The actual reason is that they were not able to innovate their business model, but in europe they told governments that it is due to piracy and new devices that allows to copy content and play it anywhere. So they obtained from government a tax to support "arts" (music and movies) based on size of memory in GB.
So there is no logic, it is just a tax like that proportional to area (in square meters or feet) of your house, to refund recording associations which are collecting less money because of they very old business model.
Regarding redistribution, at least in italy the rule is quite arbitrary and foggy, basically money is shared proportionally to money collected by other means. So, no logic also in this case, just another source of money to increase the collected total.
Copyright law has been distorted and abused to the point where consumers don't have the right to make copies of content that they have legally purchased for their own personal use. So technically when you buy a DVD movie and rip it to make a digital copy for convenient playback on different devices you are guilty of infringement. Granted, it's dead simple to make such copies and good luck to any copyright owner who thinks they can detect and prosecute consumers for such activity. But it's outrageous that consumers are turned into criminals for this perfectly reasonable activity. Additionally, these restrictions prevent software developers in many legal jurisdictions from designing software to make such copies and to circumvent copy-protection technologies for such purposes.
In Germany, however, they've reached an agreement with content owners that grants consumers the explicit legal right to make such personal copies in exchange for a modest levy on related products, the proceeds from which are then distributed to content owners. With this in mind, a $6-7 fee added to the price of a $600-800 phone seems like a perfectly reasonable compromise, short of actually reversing the ridiculous copyright laws themselves.
Exactly what I was thinking...
On another note, Germany and France required a company who makes DVR to tack on similar fee for each HDD in the DVR. The fee is based on the size of the HDD, 160GB was $10, a 250GB as $25 and 500GB was $60 and it goes up from there. At least they made it clear these were pirating taxes, these were fees paid to the government as a fine for people pirating content. The only issue is a DVR can not pirate content but they seem to think that DVR would be used for this purpose. Also the fee only went to content owner in the EU not elsewhere. The big question, I would like to see the accounting of these fees and who actually got a pay out from them.
Of course the normal government infrastructure incompetence will ensure that there is no redistribution to artists of this bizzarro tax, which will need an incremental levy increase on a regular basis to cover ineptitude with zero oversight or accountability.
I'm not sure the retroactive aspect will stand under EU rules. It's sure to be tested in court.
I'ts another 'window tax' - UK circa early 18C which resulted in many bricked-up windows.