No, it's not fiction. I live in Spain and we have a similar tax. It taxes private copys, which are defined as
1. The work must be publicly available.
2. It must be done by a physic person (as opposed to an organization)
3. For private use, i.e. not broadcasting to an open audience allowed (but I can play it in my house with my friends).
4. Access to the work must have been obtained legally.
5. Must be non-profit.
6. The receiver of the copy cannot be a collective.
So I can buy a CD and make a copy to all of my friends. They can do the same, and so on (a copy of a legal bought CD is legal).
According to some experts, P2P falls into a gray area, or it used to before they changed the law. I'm sure they will refine it progressively, but I won't stop downloading while I pay my copy tax for USB STICKS, BLANK CDs & DVDs, MP3 PLAYERS, HDDs AND EVENT PRINTERS AND PAPER.
Anyway the general attorney throw a paper stating that downloaders shouldn't be prosecuted.
One time, years ago, some members of an internet freedom organization, got a laptop with WIFI and, after calling the police to inform them of the fact, they mounted a table in the street and downloaded copyrighted works, offering free copys to whomever passed near, to show that it's legal.
There is an exception, however: Software is not covered under the private copy, so it would be illegal to copy software (being myself a developer, I have never undertood the differentiation).
The funniest part is that this tax is directly collected by private entities (our *AA counterpart), which have in the higher seats crappy artists which decide how to share the collected money (i.e. between themselves and their dearest friends). Some of them, like Alejandro Sanz, are arguably very crappy, but at least they are artists (for some definition of the word). But some others, like Teddy Bautista (ex president, now convict for different forms of stealing) or Ramoncín, AFAIK haven't composed or sung a song in the last decades.
On a tangent topic, I hate to buy videogames nowadays, with all the DRM crap and other nasties. But if I pirate them, everything works without effort, despite the industry marketing advertising the opposite (you know: beware! virus!, et cetera). I won't pay for losing my time with their nonsense. So a couple months ago I decided to only buy DRM-free games from Humble Bundle.
No, it's not fiction. I live in Spain and we have a similar tax. It taxes private copys, which are defined as
1. The work must be publicly available.
2. It must be done by a physic person (as opposed to an organization)
3. For private use, i.e. not broadcasting to an open audience allowed (but I can play it in my house with my friends).
4. Access to the work must have been obtained legally. 5. Must be non-profit.
6. The receiver of the copy cannot be a collective. So I can buy a CD and make a copy to all of my friends. They can do the same, and so on (a copy of a legal bought CD is legal).
According to some experts, P2P falls into a gray area, or it used to before they changed the law. I'm sure they will refine it progressively, but I won't stop downloading while I pay my copy tax for USB STICKS, BLANK CDs & DVDs, MP3 PLAYERS, HDDs AND EVENT PRINTERS AND PAPER.
Anyway the general attorney throw a paper stating that downloaders shouldn't be prosecuted.
One time, years ago, some members of an internet freedom organization, got a laptop with WIFI and, after calling the police to inform them of the fact, they mounted a table in the street and downloaded copyrighted works, offering free copys to whomever passed near, to show that it's legal.
There is an exception, however: Software is not covered under the private copy, so it would be illegal to copy software (being myself a developer, I have never undertood the differentiation).
The funniest part is that this tax is directly collected by private entities (our *AA counterpart), which have in the higher seats crappy artists which decide how to share the collected money (i.e. between themselves and their dearest friends). Some of them, like Alejandro Sanz, are arguably very crappy, but at least they are artists (for some definition of the word). But some others, like Teddy Bautista (ex president, now convict for different forms of stealing) or Ramoncín, AFAIK haven't composed or sung a song in the last decades.