[pp.int.general] levies consultation: HELP!

[Reinier Bakels]

I have written a lot of text into the Wiki at: http://int.piratenpartei.de/Levies_Questionnaire
But now we must make the next step. PLEASE HELP! The answer is due within a WEEK from now!

Many of the conceptual questions are relatively easy to answer from a PP perspective. Actually when I worked on it, many new ideas came into my mind.

As levies effectively are a tax, and copyright is instituted to foster culture rather than to fill the pockets of authors (and publishers!), the rule "no taxation without representation" must be respected when levy income is redistributed.

With the advent of "web 2.0" with much more user created content, the owners of mobile phones should be SUBSIDISED rather than subjected to a levy! Television news programs increasingly depend on mobile phone videos for a first hand account of disasters and other sudden news items.

Many of the factual questions are hard to answer however. The idea of a Wiki for the international PP community was to allow everyone to enter the information for his own country, but so far that only happened for Denmark, Spain, and my country, The Netherlands. But I found that even for your own country, it is virtually infeasible to contribute all the requested numbers. In NL, levies are collected by a separate organisation, but the redistribution is by numerous collective rights societies (I counted 12) who all have their own policy. So my fellow Wiki writer (Carlos?) who used the work "opaque" a number of times is VERY right, I am afraid. As I noted before, perhaps we should not even try to duplicate the work of the levy collecting organisation - who surely will respond to this questionaire as well.

I also browsed reports from the parliament (on Parlando, for the Dutch readers). The "MP3 levy" problem (as it is usually denoted) keeps coming back over the years. Often the observaion is made that The Netherlands should do nothing by itself, but wait for the EU. But we talk to the EU now, so now it becomes really important.

Another issue worth while to investigate is that the levy society (Stichting Thuiskopie) suffers from major problems to pay all the money it collected to rights owners. They had so much cash remaining that they even considered to return some money to the media manufacturers, which in turn was easier said than done. These problems are also subject of increased parlamentary scrutiny, and yet other bodies were estblished to oversee "Stichting Thuiskopie". It would be interesting to know whether similar problems exist in other countries. If other levy collecting societies have a similarly shady reputation, THAT IS NEWS TOO!

Groeten, Grüße, Regards, Cordialement, Hälsningar, Ciao, Saygilar, Üdvözlettel, Pozdrowienia, Kumusta, Adios, Oan't sjen, Ave, Doei, Yassou, Yoroshiku
>>> REINIER B. BAKELS 
private: Johan Willem Frisostraat 149, 2713 CC Zoetermeer, The Netherlands telephone: +31 79 316 3126, GSM ("Handy") +31 6 4988 6490,  fax +31 79 316 7221
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