CD-R royalties

phil hunt philh at comuno.freeserve.co.uk
Wed Jan 16 15:44:08 UTC 2002


On Tuesday 15 January 2002 11:34 pm, Eneko Lacunza wrote:
> Dear free software lovers,
>
> 	Today in Spain we have been suprised by some bad news in the media. It
> has been revealed that Traxdata Spain has been forced to pay royalties
> for each data CD-R manufactured since 1997 to Author's Society known as
> SGAE (Sociedad General de Autores de EspaƱa). The royalty free is about
> 0,18 euros per burnable hour, so each CD-R will cost between 0,22 and
> 0,24 euros more (in fact it will be between 1/2 and 1/4 of the media
> price).

Maybe we can turn this round.

The purpose of such laws (at least in principle) is that when someone copies
information onto a CD, the creator of the information gets paid. Well, authors
of free software are creators of information, aren't they? So shouldn't they
get a share of the revenue that SGAE receives? If it is too difficult to
pay each author individually, how about a big payment to FSF and Debian?


--- 
*** Philip Hunt *** philh at comuno.freeserve.co.uk ***





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