Proposed Dutch levy on iPods foiled
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Jan 9, 2008 at 2:23pm
An attempt by Dutch artists to force a levy be imposed on sales of iPods, MP3 players and blank optical media was shot down in a Netherlands court yesterday. According to Reuters, the rights organization Norma, which compensates artists for the use of their copyrighted material, lost its bid for new levies.
The Netherlands already has a levy on blank CDs and DVDs but the government says the artists’ rights bodies were not distributing the cash efficiently and wanted the problems solved before new levies were created, the article adds. “You cannot give such a system the responsibility for a new levy if you know that it is not working properly,” a justice ministry spokesman said.
Marnix Langeveld, legal affairs executive of the rights organization Norma, told Reuters that the ministry was basing its arguments on old numbers, saying Norma and other bodies had all but eliminated the backlogs. “Technology has advanced and people more and more use MP3 players and DVD recorders with a hard disk to copy instead of single CDs or DVDs,” he added, arguing that artists are the victims of this development unless a levy is imposed on such gadgets.
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
dave Says:
It’s probably just like here in Canada, where it took them more then 5 years between when they started implementing a levy on optical media [and for a brief period, iPods], and when they started sending out SOME actual money to artists [or rather, the labels for those artists]. Of course, I can’t think of a sane formula for deciding which artists should get money for the DVD’s I use to backup my files…
Posted on January 09, 2008