More products and more companies affected by copyright levies in Germany

Two important agreements on copyright levies were reached in May and June of this year: Levies for various consumer electronics devices were agreed upon and defined, and collecting societies and industry agreed assented to the new level of fees for USB sticks and memory cards.

It has always been the intention of the German collecting societies to make the whole product chain of privately used devices subject to levy, starting with MP3/4-player, mobile phones/ smartphones with larger displays, tablets, notebooks, PCs and finally smart TVs. This was effectively achieved, thereby placing various new product within the scope of the levy system.

All affected companies are now obliged to take unsolicited action: In order to reverse accruals, the corresponding sales-volumes since 2008, or 2012 must be reported considering that reduced tariffs apply to precedent periods if companies commit themselves to a contract as soon as possible. For the above-mentioned storage media in the period from 2012 onwards, the membership option will expire on July 31.

Subsequently, the ongoing processing of obligations essentially consists of adhering to deadlines, dates and formats. Last but not least, the charges must also be taken into account in the pricing to upstream suppliers and end customers. A charge of 30 cents per USB stick, or 12 euros for a multimedia hard disk makes a difference here.

For more information, please feel free to contact us at: copyright@1cc-consulting.com