The levy will compensate content creators for their work
Italy’s retailers association has added its voice to the chorus of criticism that greeted last week’s announcement of a new levy on digital storing devices to finance the production of creative content.
The recording devices tax, which will go into effect after being published in the Official Gazette, increases in proportion to the device’s memory capacity and the resulting revenue will be distributed by the Italian Society of Authors and Publishers (SIAE) to the creators of copyright material.
Giorgio Rapari, the head of the Innovation Commission of the national retailers’ association Confcommercio, described the measure as “a tax on innovation” and said it was the latest demonstration that the government did not consider innovation a priority for the country.
“The economic crisis is having a strong impact on the entire Italian ICT and consumer electronics sector, with a particular decline in hardware sales, down 5.1 percent,” Rapari said in a prepared statement released Monday. “In this context the ministerial decree amounts to a real low blow, not just for the sector but for the market in general,” Rapari said.
Rapari complained the tax was progressively related to the recording capacity of the devices rather than to their cost, “without considering technological trends that are leading to a greater availability of memory at ever more reduced prices.”
Guidalberto Guidi, the head of the consumer electronics sector of the employers’ association Confindustria, voiced similar criticisms last Friday. Consumers now found they were paying three times over for creative content, once for the content itself, once for the hardware device that records and plays it and once for the software platform, “to exercise their right to make a copy of digital content that they have purchased legally.”
The tax was described as “unfair and unjustified” by Alessandro Mondini Branzi, CEO of Nokia Italia, who said the approval of the measure by the Culture Ministry left him “absolutely disconcerted.”
“Listening to music is just one of the many functions available on a mobile phone, the content of which has normally been legally purchased by the consumer, who has therefore paid the royalties on it in their entirety,” Mondini Branzi said in a prepared statement.
Culture Minister Sandro Bondi defended the levy as the application of a European Union directive that balanced the interests of manufacturers, consumers and authors. He was backed by Giorgio Assumma, the president of SIAE, who said the measure was similar to levies in France, Germany and Spain.
The tax will compensate content creators for their work, which brings economic benefits to other new technology companies, without damaging the interests of the end users, Assumma said in a statement.
