Private Copying Levy - History

History

Such levies were first introduced in the USA in response to lobbying from the recording industry with the advent of the Audio cassette. Legislators were persuaded at the time that cassette recorders would decimate sales of records as friend after friend would then make copies of only one purchased album. This never happened and levies today are assessed on compact discs a form of media that did not exist when levies were first conceived with the bulk of unrecorded compact discs actually being used in the computing industry yet are still "taxed" to provide a revenue stream to the recording industry.

Levies are often considered a compensation for illegal file sharing. This is debatable however: levies could be seen as not being an advance for fines, but rather, only intended to compensate for copies in the private sphere that are legally allowed in many jurisdictions. A notable exception in Europe is the UK, that does not allow private copies. But generally legislators allow private copies for two reasons: firstly, because otherwise the enforcement would be unfeasible for private reasons, and secondly because the administrative burden would be disproportional.

If one buys a CD, and makes a copy on a MP3 player to listen to it when outdoors, should the author be compensated once more for this copy? According to age-old copyright principles the answer is affirmative: any copy represents a "multiplication" in the sense of copyright law. Those principles date from an era when copying required expensive, professional equipment. Should the old legal rule be maintained now that copying technology is pervasive? Some people find it hard to believe that payments are due for private copies of legally obtained material. Yet, that is the basis for private copying levies.