Blank media price hike in Sweden in July :/

[Paul Adams]

English Article Here

Basically, included in the recent spate of changes to the law here (where it was legal to download pretty much anything, only actually sharing the content was illegal) the Swedish parliament have approved a price hike of around 1/3 for blank CDs & DVDs.

It's being dubbed (another) tax, but this money is specifically going to a fund which pays out to recording artists allegedly to cover their losses for people making illegal copies of their work.

Parliament also approved a proposal to sharply raise the price of blank CDs, DVDs, videotapes and cassettes to compensate for legal copying of material. The price of a five gigabyte DVD is expected to rise from 10 kronor to 30 kronor.

(30kr ~= £2.20)

Well that sucks, I buy all my stuff as originals and use blanks for moving around huge sets of data, backups of downloaded software (e.g. hundreds of megs of Far Cry 64-bit patches), updated slipstream OS installs and the like.
Nothing copyrighted at all - sure I've ripped all my CDs to MP3s for covenience (the originals sitting in storage) but I've never given them to anyone else or put them onto discs, and I've never been tempted to make a "backup" of my DVD collection for whatever reason.

From what I've heard, the price hike takes effect from 1st July and also gets put onto devices like MP3 players & PVRs, so I suppose it'll have a short-term effect of increasing sales in June, and a long-term effect of increasing imports (or possibly ironically theft) of these items.

/rant

[XA04]

God thats gay .

Time to order more blank cds/dvds before this gets into action then..

[Jonny M]

So what about the millions of people who use blank CDs/DVDs for things other than pirating stuff onto?

[5lab]

they pay the tax too. its just as fair as everyone in this country having to pay tax which goes towards (say) a childrens ward at a hospital which we'd never use.

besides, i know a LOT less people who burn disks for legitimate reasons than those them burn them illegally

[TiG]

So even manufacturers of games will have to pay the tax then?, i mean surely they need to purchase them to burn the game onto.

I'd guess that might be a bit of a closed view of the legitimate businesses that produce hundreds of thousands of CD/DVD per year.

TiG

[utdmleach]

So even manufacturers of games will have to pay the tax then?, i mean surely they need to purchase them to burn the game onto.

I'd guess that might be a bit of a closed view of the legitimate businesses that produce hundreds of thousands of CD/DVD per year.

TiG

I thought they pressed their discs

[Agent]

I thought they pressed their discs

Yup. The quote says "blank" disks. Id imagine that non-consumer writable formats wouldnt be included ?

[oralpain]

I've never met anyone who burns disks for purely illegal uses. Most disks I burn are backups or linux distros.

This is a dumb tax, I wouldn't pay it.

[5lab]

This is a dumb tax, I wouldn't pay it.

what would you do then? steal the disks? dont be daft...

if you *need* to burn stuff for install use, you can simply do it on rw disks that you can use again and again.

[Steve]

if you *need* to burn stuff for install use, you can simply do it on rw disks that you can use again and again.

I've been through so many Linux distros that CDRW is the only sensible way forward.

[oralpain]

what would you do then? steal the disks? dont be daft...

if you *need* to burn stuff for install use, you can simply do it on rw disks that you can use again and again.

I'd get the discs elsewhere, or not buy them at all/not use them.

I don't pay taxes on gasoline, I buy it at the Tonawanda reservation.

I don't pay taxes on computer parts, I buy them from out of state over the internet.

If I was in california I wouldn't buy rifle amunition there, I would drive to nevada, oregon, or arizona, where there is no ammunition tax.

If I lived in Sweden I would find out how much CD-Rs cost in Norway, Finland, Denmark or where ever else was reasonably easy to get to, then I would go where the total price was cheapest, buy a thousand of them and take them back home. Any I didn't use I could sell to my buddies at half Swedish cost and probably still be making a profit and the Swedish government wouldn't be getting squat. It would serve them right for implimenting such an absurd law.