Quote:
Originally Posted by axel77
You know, there are even some funny effects. In my country there is an extra tax on recordable CDs, a tax that goes fully to the RIAA. They argued, because people do all kind of illegal things with the CD, they got compensated beforehand.
Just imagine that! I pay already extra, because I *might* do an illegal with my CD recorder... its just so hillarious. (or rather sad)
As company you can be freed of this tax, if you explicitly prove you are using the recordable CDs for something legal like data backups... but you can never get this exemption as private person.
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If that is true I would consider it tacit permission to rip whatever music you want and burn it to CD - since they've accused you, the buyer of blank CD, of ripping them off anyway and charged you for it.
In the Netherlands we had a similar situation where the "stichting Thuiskopie" (home copy foundation), appointed by the ministry of justice, collected dues on blank CDs and other media to the tune of 57 million and were supposed to pass them on to artists. This never happened - their position was something like: let the artists come to us. Yeah, like a piano player in Japan knows some idiot outfit in the Netherlands is holding money for him. In some cases the artists had disbanded, or died, and this foundation really wasn't that interested in finding them.
At any rate, the tax was for "home copying", in other words, a private copy or format shifting - are you sure your tax isn't similar?