lunes, 20 de septiembre de 2004

They are getting there

So now it turns out that it is illegal to make your own copies or remixes of CDs for personal use, according to the new Civil Code of Spanish Law. The thing is: it is illegal to break any anti-copy mechanism of a CD. Therefore, since all CDs are nowadays protected in some way, any copy of a CD is illegal.
Paradoxically, the SGAE (the Spanish equivalent to the RIAA in America, the organism responsible of protecting the rights of authors) introduced last year a tax on every virgin CD sold on Spain, no matter whether you used it to store your drawings or to copy music, to "compensate for the loss of money due to CD piracy". Ever since last year, they've made 36 million euros. Now they think this tax is compatible with the new civil code, which makes it illegal to copy any protected CD. What do they want, law or market? You cannot have control over both. You cannot make people pay a tax to compensate for an illegal activity. It would be like charging a tax for guns, to compensate for the victims of murders (which is actually quite a good idea, by the way ... just that is screws my reasoning. anyway, you know what i mean)

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