Commission backtracks on tape duties

Date: 02/10/1997

By Peter Chapman

THE European Commission is preparing to drop plans to harmonise the levies some EU countries charge on blank audio and video cassettes when it launches a draft directive on information society copyright later this year.

Internal market sources say the Commission will instead allow member states to retain such duties, which are used to compensate music and film producers for losses caused by individuals copying their work for personal use.

“One likely scenario is that we provide for some framework, but inside it there is still some room for member

state subsidiarity,” said one source, who admitted: “This is not satisfactory from a single market point of view.”

Officials in the Commission's Directorate-General for the internal market (DGXV) say the issue has been discussed “at the highest level” between Commissioner Mario Monti and his political aides.

The harmonisation of such levies was originally seen as a key part of the forthcoming proposal for a new directive on EU intellectual property rules to take account of technological developments such as the Internet, updating and harmonising reproduction rights to allow for the fact that perfect digital-quality copies of music can now be made.

The Commission's original plan aimed to end the current situation where 11 member states already operate various versions of such a scheme and four (the UK, Sweden, Luxembourg and Ireland) do not.

The tape industry regards the current patchwork of levies as a nagging barrier to trade in tapes inside the EU. It has argued in favour of an end to all duties but, failing that, would prefer a harmonised system to the existing mixture of measures.

The European Tape Industry Council (ETIC) concedes there is now little prospect of victory. “I think the Commission will leave it out of the directive despite the distortions to trade that different levies cause,” said ETIC lobbyist Maria Laptev, who accused the Commission of shirking a difficult decision. “We think the bottom line is that the Commission has so much on its plate and it sees what the member states are telling it,” she said.

“On one hand, France and Denmark have high levies and they don't want to reduce them. On the other hand, the UK and Luxembourg don't have levies and don't want to bring them in. The Commission is saying to itself 'why bring something in when it is going to be difficult?'.”

But she said the ETIC would continue to push for a change of heart.

Music industry representatives have also urged the Commission to outlaw such levies, arguing that separate moves to give legal protection to anti-copying devices used on music products will be jeopardised if private taping continues to be tolerated in member states which run levy schemes.