Awful Spanish Copyright Law May Be Stalled Waiting For EU Court Ruling On Plans To Change Spain's Copyright Levy System
from the stopping-good-ideas,-stopping-bad-ideas dept
Techdirt has written about Spain's new copyright law a couple of times. There, we concentrated on the "Google tax" that threatens the digital commons and open access in that country. But alongside this extremely foolish idea, there was another good one: getting rid of the anachronistic levy on recording devices that was supposed to "compensate" for private copying (as if any such compensation were needed), and paying collecting societies directly out of Spain's state budget. Needless to say, it is such a good idea that the collecting societies hate it, and have appealed against the new system. As a result, the Spanish Supreme Court has referred two questions to the European Union Court of Justice (EUCJ), given here in the translation on the IPKat blog:A -- Is a copyright levy system, that -- taking as a basis the estimation of the actual damage -- is financed through the State budget thus not making possible to guarantee that the costs of this compensation are only supported by the users of the private copies (as opposed to the non-users), compliant with Article 5(2)(b)b) of [EU] Directive 2001/29?So it looks like we will get another copyright judgment from the EUCJ, which has been increasingly called upon to give definitive rulings in this area. The IPKat notes that until the EUCJ decision is handed down, all of Spain's new copyright law may be put on hold -- no bad thing considering how awful much of it is.
B -- If the answer is in the affirmative, is it compliant with Article 5(2)(b) of Directive 2001/29 that the total quantity set aside by the government for this compensation, which is calculated in view of the estimation of the actual damage, is set within [or conditioned by] the budget restrictions for each financial year?
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: copyright, eu court of justice, levy, spain
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
Well, in the U.S. the whole idea behind delegating copy protection laws from the states to the federal government was to, hopefully, do just this. Unfortunately, just like with state laws, it only took the side of those that bought laws and hence copy protection laws kept getting expanded and retroactively extended. The side of the public interest was completely ignored.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
What about the previous system?
Surely under the existing copyright levy system it is not "possible to guarantee that the costs of this compensation are only supported by the users of the private copies" since the costs are born by all users of the devices and media that are taxed regardless of whether they use their devices to make copies of (other people's) copyrighted works or not.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]