I never heard of this before, an EU tax on blank media to compensate copyright owners that are robbed of the royalties they would otherwise have received from sales lost to illegal copies (techdirt link here). This seems nutty to me. Though the amount cannot be much, say for each CD, what basis is there for deciding who gets how much? It has to be arbitrary, another gravy train and the totals must be large. I buy blank CDs for backups of my computer files and to distribute family photos and surmise many Europeans do as well, so I conclude that much of the tax is a straight handout to people who have not been offended. The story goes on that the Europeans were going to abolish the tax but recipients of this largess appear to have fought it successfully. The more I am exposed to stories like this, the surer I am that the IP system as we know it has to go.

Yes, in France this "private" tax was introduced. Of course we now have the "DADVSI" law (= worse than DMCA) which means that the tax "pays" for a right to copy we no longer have in a DRM world.

Even more bad taste, those who receive the tax are supposed to spend 25% of it on live arts for the public, and they used that to threaten french assembly members of cutting funding for their local city festivals if they didn't vote for DRM:

http://guerby.org/blog/index.php/2006/02/16/20-dadvsi-les-maitres-chanteurs-oeuvrent-dans-l-ombre

...

Canada has a similar tax on blank media with most of the proceeds going to a fund that gives grants to Canadian artists. At least in Canada, though, part of the deal is that it's legal to make "backup" copies of music & other copyrighted materials that one buys. Does make me wonder if there's any significant smuggling of blank media from the US into Canada, though.