Fujitsu Siemens of Germany is being sued by a copyright society
that is demanding royalties of 30 Euros (around £19) for every PC
the company sells, pursuant to a new copyright tax. It follows
similar action in Germany last May against Hewlett-Packard. The
action settled with HP agreeing to pay around 6 Euros (£3.75) for
every CD burner it sold.
Many countries, including France and Germany, have laws to
protect authors and musicians by taxing sales of tape recorders and
video players, products regularly used to illegally copy their
works. Towards the end of last year, Germany took the step of
extending this protection into the “digital age” by taxing sales of
modern devices that make for easy copying and transferring of
copyright-protected material. France followed suit, with its tax
targeting sales of CD-Rs (recordable CDs) and DVDs from January
this year.
The action against Fujitsu Siemens, Germany’s largest and
Europe’s second largest PC manufacturer, is an attempt to
significantly extend the copyright tax to computer sales. According
to an interview with WSJ.com, Fujitsu Siemens will argue in its
defence that a copy of something stored on a computer’s hard disk
does not constitute a digital medium like CD or DVD and therefore
that computers are not covered by the tax. The risk for Germany is
that its tax could drive manufacturing elsewhere.
