According to a document consulted by L’Informé, rightsholders — the copyright holders of works such as music, films, photos and texts — want to extend the private copying tax to copies stored in the cloud and computers.
Do you hear the sweet and harmonious symphony of taxes? After the GAFAM taxes, the taxes for streaming, the taxes on parcels, the VAT hike, the private copying tax for refurbished devices, it seems like it’s time for us to have our drink at the hand and toast to the arrival of a new guest at the party: the tax on private copying on PCs.
According The Informed, our computers may soon be subject to this private copying tax. And guess who came up with this brilliant idea? Rights holders, of course. For those of you who have not yet had the privilege of hearing about this royalty, it is compensation collected by organizations such as SACEM, SCPP, SACD, and others. , intended to compensate for the possibility offered to people to make copies of their works without authorization. To determine how much these organizations are entitled to collect, user studies are carried out with a panel of around 1,000 people. The more these people report copying works, the more the rates can increase.
Since 2018, if you have a smartphone with more than 64 GB of storage space, you are subject to a tax of 14 euros excluding VAT. And that’s how they manage to collect 300 million euros in royalties every year. For now, only copies made on media such as USB sticks, external hard drives, smartphones, tablets, memory cards, etc. were taken into account.
The pretext of the cloud to tax PCs
However, in a document that L’Informé had the opportunity to consult, rights holders are now asking that backups of music, films, photos, texts in the cloud also be taxed.
In other words, if you move your music files, movies, photos or texts to cloud storage services like Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud or OVH (often because your computer’s storage space is full), these copies could soon be taxed. The reasoning behind this is that even if these copies are moved to the cloud, they are still copies of copyrighted works and therefore should be subject to the private copying tax. The intention of the rights holders is not to impose taxes on cloud services, but rather to target the manufacturers of the devices that provide access to these services.
By expanding the scope of this tax to include the cloud, rights holders are taking the opportunity to argue that the computers themselves should be subject to this tax. Until now, computers have been exempt from this tax, but if the rights holders’ proposal is accepted, this could change.
A new tax El Dorado for rights holders
In short, it would therefore seem that the cloud is the new tax El Dorado for rights holders. With a tax of around 14 euros per computer, which is the tariff mainly applied to mobile phones today in France and close to the German scale on computers, this should generate a surplus of 62 million euros in remuneration for private copying every year. For them it’s a godsend, for the users a bitter new pill to swallow.
It is a significant extension of the scope of the private copying tax which, if implemented, could have a significant impact on users of cloud services and computers.
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