The taxation applied to digital devices could be reviewed by the authorities, with an impact on your computer.
The “private copying” levy, established in 1985, aims to compensate copyright societies for the possibility offered by different devices to make copies of works. From the 2000s, it extended to digital devices such as CDs, DVDs, tablets and other smartphones (with some imbroglios for refurbished smartphones). This list may well grow in the future.
The “private copy” tax, the turn of the cloud?
This is news, and not really the best, which has just been transmitted by the media The Informed. The members of the Private Copying Commission, located within the Ministry of Culture and in charge of managing the “private copying” levy, are currently working on an update of the latter. The opportunity for rights holders such as the Society of Authors, Composers and Music Publishers (SACEM) or the Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers (SACD) to request the integration of new technological means in the list of devices subject to the tax .
They want cloud services, where images, photos, music or videos can be stored (and therefore “copied”), to also be subject to the fee in the future. To support their argument, they recall the so-called Austro-Mechana case law established by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on March 24, 2022, according to which all media allowing reproduction were covered by the tax. This included reproductions made ” on a server in which a storage space is made available to a user “.
Computers might not cut it anymore
So, will the big cloud providers like OVH, iCloud, Dropbox and other Amazon Drive have to pay in turn? Not necessarily, because for the European Court, the consequence of its decision would not necessarily be the taxation of cloud specialists offering storage. Instead, the devices from which the storage operations would start could be rather preferred by the authorities.
These devices have a name for the rights holders: computers. Either devices that were not currently taxed. ” Personal computers, as well as smartphones or tablets, are likely to be used for cloud backup, either by using the device’s operating system (e.g. Microsoft’s One Drive service), or a content management system (e.g. iTunes), or dedicated backup software “, they explain in a note.
If they were to end up winning their case, a fee of around 14 euros could be added to the cost of each computer, an amount already levied for each smartphone in France under private copying.
Source : The Informed
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