Petteri Pyyny
20 Nov 2006 10:53
Today, all the major lobby organizations of the recording industry jointly announced that they want to start charging cell phone manufacturers a levy for each cell phone sold that is capable of playing MP3s or other music formats.
Organizations (Kopiosto, Gramex, Teosto and Tuotos) claim that the current situation in Finland, where stand-alone MP3 players, like Apple's iPod, carry a levy upto 15 euros ($19.22), is unfair as the phones that are marketed as "music phones" escape the levy fee.
Considering that world's largest mobile phone manufacturer, Nokia, is a Finnish company (and employs almost 25,000 people in Finland -- a country with a population of just over 5M), it would be interesting to see how this requirement is responded by the consumer electronics lobby organizations who have fought against the extremely draconian levy fee system of Finland for years. Then again, considering how the Finnish government handled the last year's copyright reform, it is quite likely that the recording industry will succeed.
In Finland, labels currently collect levy (a nice word for private taxation) for these items among others:
Furthermore, there are virtually no Finnish Net radios due the extremely high copyright fees labels seek from Net broadcasting, taxis have to pay a fixed fee for having their radio on when accepting customers and three years ago labels started seeking royalties from day nurseries for singing nursery rhymes.
More information:
Teosto (in Finnish only)