Does paying 14 euros for the right to manually copy the contents of a CD on your smartphone still make sense in 2022? Regarding this thorny issue of the canon for private copying, the General Treasury Inspectorate (IGF) and the Cultural Affairs Inspectorate (IGAC) would like more transparency, they explain in a report mentioned by the l’Informé site. A document of more than 300 pages, which Tech&Co was also able to consult.
As a reminder, the private copying tax, introduced in France in 1985, consists of charging buyers of storage media (cassettes, CDs, and later smartphones) for the right to make copies for personal use, for example, on a DVD player. MP3 to listen. to a song on the go. But the current situation faces a great paradox: although the uses have evolved, this royalty has never brought so much to rights holders: around 300 million euros each year.
biased studies
And for good reason, the main device affected by this fee is none other than the smartphone. For models whose storage capacity is equal to or greater than 64 GB (most smartphones sold in France), the customer will have to pay the sum of 14 euros, included in the displayed price.
To justify this fee, the Private Copying Remuneration Commission is based on usage studies, financed by the rights holders themselves. According to the report, these studies, which seek to question a panel of French people to understand their uses, suffer from important shortcomings, with overly complex questions and much smaller samples than in our European neighbours. All with a methodology that has not been updated since 2012 and dated data.
“Usage studies that are the basis of the major media scales are based on usage data dating back to 2017 or 2018 at best, and therefore old given rapidly evolving practices.” of consumption”, deals with the report, which points out that the income from this canon could “reach 380 million euros in the short term”.
The two inspections also point to the opacity surrounding these studies that supposedly justify the application of this rate, which, however, are not made public. So much so that the systematic publication of such studies is the first proposal of the report.
The most “taxed” French
In general, the report points out the biases of these studies to make them artificially favorable to rights holders. As Informed points out, rights holders even include downloads from Internet users who use streaming platforms such as Deezer or Spotify as examples of the application of the private copy system.
Problem: these downloads do not refer to the private copy, insofar as the user already pays his subscription to obtain this offline listening service and, therefore, cannot be billed twice, reminds the General Inspectorate of Treasury (IGF) and the Inspection of Cultural Affairs (IGAC).
Despite the evolution of uses, the government decided to subject refurbished smartphones to this private copying tax in 2021, much to the chagrin of the then Digital Secretary of State Cédric O.
If the subject is so delicate, it is because the French rights holders are the most greedy in the European Union. According to the figures mentioned in the report, a French person paid 4.1 euros a year for private copying in 2018, compared to 4 euros for a German and 50 cents for a Swede.
Source: BFM TV
