Dutch entertainment industry cracks down on media surcharges

April 17, 2004

Lol, those pesky Dutch! They's a slippery bunch! 😉 Now that the filesharing scofflaws search is well underway, the entertainment industry is going to put the brakes on blank media that is not enjoying the benefit of a surcharge being tacked on.

The private copying surcharge, 'thuiskopievergoeding', (say that ten times real fast) established in 1991, is collected on certain storage media deployed in duplicating copyright audio and video material for personal use.

Stichting Thiskopie and Stichting BREIN (another industry association established in 1998 to fight piracy and protect the copyrights of its constituents) have started visiting various media fairs in the Netherlands to check on the sale of blank CDs and DVDs.

Offenders - some ten of whom are caught per event visited, according to Stichting Thuiskopie - are given an explanation of the law and subsequently required to pay the uncollected surcharge, or have their discs confiscated.

"[Bypassing the surcharge] creates unfair competition because traders can ask much lower prices for their disks," said Tim Kuik of Stichting BREIN, who estimates that several hundred thousand discs evade the surcharge every year

Arrrrrrr!
Blast these surchaaaarges is what I say. Get rid of 'em all and it'll balance the competition too! See ya at the fair matey!

Source: DMeurope