Dracken,
I bet those taxes are nothing compared to finnish taxes.. :>
Like one good example is the casette fee/tax, or whatever in english.
Has to pay little bit of money for empty casettes (including CD's and such recordable media)
and the money goes to an institution which is supposed to watch after the copyright laws.
Teosto's role
Teosto acts as a link between the creators and users of music. Teosto grants on behalf of copyright owners all permits and licences required for the use of music, collects the licence fees and distributes the collected fees to the copyright owners on the basis of programme details (repertoire lists etc.) which Teosto receives from the users of music.
After having acquired Teosto's permit or licence, the music user practically has the whole world's musical treasures at his disposal.
With the casette fee/tax, they assume always that the casettes will be bought in intention to record copyrighted material on it and therefore they collect this 'casette fee/tax', which is supposedly compensation for the producers/publishers for home recordings.
Latest innovation from them was to ban playing music in cabs, when having a customer, unless they've paid taxes for it.
Same thing has been also planned for schools and kindergartens.
Costs for recorded media;
picture casette: 0.76 cents per minute
audio casette: 0.50 cents per minute
audio CD-R & RW: 0.50 cents per minute
minidisc: 0.50 cents per minute
computer CD-R & RW: 0.25 cents per minute
Costs for recordable media;
Recordable video DVD (DVD-R/RW video, DVD-RAM, DVD+RW): 0.76 cents for each begining minute
Computer recordable DVD (DVD-R/RW data, DVD-RAM, DVD+RW): Audio; 0.13 + video; 0.19 cents per minute
MP3 players: 0.50 cents per minute (according to amount of audio which can be saved on the player)
For example a recordable 240 minute VHS casette would have over 18 euros casette fee/tax.
So go figure...
They always assume that people will be recording copyrighted media on something and therefore collects copyright costs.
plus what comes to media shown in public places. (institutions, busses, cabs, stores... and so on)
and they've been also sharing misleading anti-piratism notices. (somewhat exagerated ones)
Of course we have those lovely TV permit fees, like in UK.
