Private copying tax decreases for almost all devices and disappears for set-top boxes – Sound and Vision – News

SONT has determined the level of the private copying fee for 2023-2024. This shows, among other things, that the private copying levy on set-top boxes will disappear. Most other fares are reduced. Industry associations believe the new tariffs are still too high.

The home copy levy for the period is Friday published by the Home Copy Compensation Negotiations Foundation and it appeared in the government gazette. The foundation will completely abolish the tax on hard disk recorders and set-top boxes with integrated HDD from 1 January 2023, where it was previously 5.30 euros. It happens later a proposal from the industry association NLconnect. The association says such set-top boxes are hardly used for local storage, as more and more providers are switching to streaming and ‘network PVrs’, where TV recordings are made on a central server. The performance of such devices has therefore become increasingly low. In addition to the zero tariff on set-top boxes, an inflation correction has also been made in the new tariffs, according to SONT.

The previous tariffs should have applied up to and including 2023, but have changed in the meantime. The SONT does this in response to a court ruling in March this year. The court then ruled that offline downloads from streaming services like Netflix and Spotify don’t count as home copying. This sentence was later confirmed by the Supreme Court. That’s why rates on most types of equipment are coming down. The new rates will apply from 1 January 2023 to 31 December 2024.

The withdrawal on smartphones, for example, drops to 5.30 euros; this rate rose sharply in the previous period, from 4.70 to 7.30 euro. Rates on other types of devices are also decreasing. For example, the rate on e-readers will drop from 1.10 to 0.70 euros and the charge on external storage media of 256GB or higher will go from 1 euro to 80 cents. The levy on tablets will instead increase by 40 cents to 2.60 euros.

The trade associations NLDigital, STOBI, NLconnect and FIAR-CE, which represent the interests of manufacturers and distributors of electrical devices with storage capacity, indicate that they do not agree with the new SONT decision. They believe that rates have not come down enough. The associations say, among other things, that the damages suffered by copyright holders due to home copies are decreasing due to the rise of streaming services. “However, the total levy for private copying has remained at the same high level of around 40 million euros a year for years,” NLconnect writes in a statement. “The high rates charged by consumers don’t do justice to the fact that people are copying less and less,” writes NLconnect. Industry associations including NLDigital and NLconnect also believe that rate setting is “far from transparent”.