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  • Jan 16, 2013 @ 12:46pm

    Re: Thank you for justifying piracy!

    Actually, this levy has nothing to do with piracy, it is a compensation for the right of private copying, which is legal. Suppose you buy a CD, but you want to rip it to listen the music on your mp3 player. The law allows you to do it, but in return it asks you for this levy.

  • Feb 17, 2012 @ 09:23am

    Re:

    Wrong. The Portuguese Government will not receive money from this.

  • Feb 17, 2012 @ 06:35am

    Re: I'm all for these taxes...

    They don't mean that. You pay these "taxes" to listen the CD you bought on your mp3 player.

  • Feb 17, 2012 @ 06:30am

    Re: slight exageration

    I'm Portuguese and I'm following closely this question

    First
    This "taxes" don't imply piracy at home. This "taxes" are required for the following situation: you buy a CD and you rip it to your computer or mp3 player. You are paying to listen the CD you bought in your mp3 player.

    Second
    "The authors share CANNOT be waived in any form"
    This is an attack to Creative Commons and other open access and copyleft licenses, as well as new business models that rely on giving the digital work for free to increase the physical sales or the merchandising around the work. Because it means the citizen will have to pay a compensation ("taxes") even if the author gives the work for free.
    Besides, the associations that collect the money don't allow Creative Commons authors as members. They don't like copyleft licenses and already said publicly they will not represent these authors. These authors will never get the money, even if they wanted to, which they don't.

    There is the pressure from editors problem, but you have to solve it on the editors side. You can't solve a problem by limiting and prohibiting the victim.

    Third
    We don't know if money is getting the authors. We have this "taxes" for photocopiers, CD, DVD since 2004. Most of the money is lost in the process: there is one association that collects the money and takes a percentage, than it distributes it to other nine associations, each one takes a percentage and then we don't know how it goes to authors because they are private associations.
    But we found out that one of this associations, that represent academic authors which books are the most copied, never received any money from the association that collects that money.
    Furthermore, you only can copy a part of the book from the library, you can't copy the whole book nor the most part of it.

    This law does not give anything new. They just want us to pay more for what we already have (which is almost nothing - today, in what digital works are concerned you only can do private copy of CD, anything else has DRM and you can't breaking it even for private or education use).