Many countries, including France and Germany, have laws to protect authors and musicians by taxing sales of tape recorders and video players, products regularly used to illegally copy their works. Towards the end of last year, Germany took the step of extending this protection into the “digital age” by taxing sales of modern devices that make for easy copying and transferring of copyright-protected material. France followed suit, with its tax targeting sales of CD-Rs (recordable CDs) and DVDs from January this year.
The action against Fujitsu Siemens, Germany’s largest and Europe’s second largest PC manufacturer, is an attempt to significantly extend the copyright tax to computer sales. According to an interview with WSJ.com, Fujitsu Siemens will argue in its defence that a copy of something stored on a computer’s hard disk does not constitute a digital medium like CD or DVD and therefore that computers are not covered by the tax. The risk for Germany is that its tax could drive manufacturing elsewhere.