Hi Phil,
El mié, 16-01-2002 a las 16:44, phil hunt escribió:
Today in Spain we have been suprised by some bad news in the media. It has been revealed that Traxdata Spain has been forced to pay royalties for each data CD-R manufactured since 1997 to Author's Society known as SGAE (Sociedad General de Autores de España). The royalty free is about 0,18 euros per burnable hour, so each CD-R will cost between 0,22 and 0,24 euros more (in fact it will be between 1/2 and 1/4 of the media price).
Maybe we can turn this round. The purpose of such laws (at least in principle) is that when someone copies information onto a CD, the creator of the information gets paid. Well, authors of free software are creators of information, aren't they? So shouldn't they get a share of the revenue that SGAE receives? If it is too difficult to pay each author individually, how about a big payment to FSF and Debian?
Yes, it is a clever idea and we have talked about it a bit. Anyway, we're going against the royalties first, if the are set up definitely, will fight for our money 8)
The big problem is who is the author os a free software, and how he can ask for his money.
Regards