List by the Senate
List by the Congress of Deputies
File labels' senate '
Morning arrives at the Congress of Deputies, following the request of the Senate, an amendment that royalty is eliminated. This comes in parallel to the entire movement TodosContraelCanon, with its debate on the street on canon good or canon wrong, and of course, there are versions for all tastes, and reasons for its elimination.
To the layman, what the Senate is proposing the withdrawal within a period of one year, and the search for alternatives that protect the rights of authors, I mean by "protect" as a "search for money." This would ultimately remains a kind of artificial support private rights, when this government of Spain, and also the autonomic, have spent money to develop a thick such alternatives with free license (GPL) both in operating systems and in software applications . In other words, the Senate is not proposing a complete withdrawal of revenue for use of copyrights.
By way of royalty, is collected annually from about 100millones € uros, (those who have not internalized that they know that the euro is about 16,638 million peseta), which manages a single entity in the form of pseudo-society SGAE, which divided between a handful of companies associated authors, 7 partners in particular. Needless to say that the authors themselves do not know which party will receive, but that would be another matter.
In six years, revenues from the SGAE has multiplied by 11, in an almost exponential growth, that is, if listed, its shares would be sold at the price of gold.
The fee is levied on automatically, without asking or informing. It applies increasingly more electronic devices and multimedia everything in the final. Not long ago there were rumors that it was considering applying the royalty fees to connect to the Internet, Spain remains one of the countries with the most expensive connection.
But besides the charge is applied on many occasions in duplicate, for example:
- a cd-r is a fee that exceeds their own price, but also a CD recorder's also carries another fee
- and some others also exist in which players do not copy, multifunction printers, laptop ...
Canon digital does not apply in all countries of the European Union, thereby creating a secondary market of foreign products cheaper for not being taxed at that rate and thereby harm the products manufactured here. At the same time, these products without charge were considered illegal sale but one of the pillars of the EU is the free flow of goods and capital.
The fee was imposed following the failure to prevent illegal copying and illegal trade, very different from private copying. In fact, the last of the Minister of Culture is to justify the fee to "legalize" private copying, something that has always been legal, says Enrique Dans. Therefore, the Minister of Culture believe that we are all criminals, and we use a multifunction printer to photocopy books, for example.
The trade in illegal copies rose from the development of information technology, Internet, multimedia and everything. All this while cheaper production costs, promotion and distribution of these same authors, while also creating new forms of distribution not previously operated, including radio, television and videos on-line, mobile, and so on.
Quite the contrary to what one would expect by improving technology, product prices not declined, despite a growing niche market there are better and more direct ways to reach commercial success.
These are the rates of the canyon digital proposals:
- Storage unit: charged with 12 €
- Printer: € 10 to € 7.95
- Scanner: 9 €
- Mobile phone or PDA: 1.5 €
- MP3/Mp4/iPods: 3.15 €
- Memory USB € 0.30
- CD + DVD recorder 3.40 €
- CD recorder: 0.60 €
- DVD-RW € 0.60
- DVD-R € 0.44 (price of a DVD-R approximately 0.48 €)
- CD-RW € 0.22
- CD-R 0.17 € (the price of the CD-R is about 0.20 €)
My conclusion is that the canon is a measure and indiscriminate, which presupposes some misuses of the technology, and punished regardless of what it is conducted or not, and end the canon has served for many things but little in proportion to compensate for distribuidoras.Distribuidoras authors and yes, that prior to adjust to the changing market, prefer cash, cash and constant, because we do not forget that the collection of fees has nothing to do with the success of a product intellectual property.
That is, Fulanito (author or distributor) may have a pathetic product (music, video, film ...) and yet enter million for royalties on sales of mp3 players. And this goes against the market supply and demand, and becomes a form of unfair competition in the marketplace against foreign distributors here, or in other countries with Spanish royalty.
The last thing is that the Spanish Government intends to give the impression that gives us a pardon by the fact allow the existence of the canon, which makes us ago legalized pirates.
Therefore I hope that the canon disappears, and not only in Spain if not all European countries in which it applies, but for now we will see that says Congress tomorrow.
