And the Bullshit Legal Concept Award goes to... Private copying levy! Congrats!

[0xdeadbeef]

Funny side fact: at least in Germany there is a clear distinction between analog an digital copy but also between books and other media. Like the fee fo fee on photocopier, printers etc. is handled by a different organization ("collecting society") than the one on blank CDs, HDs, MP3 players etc.

Now as stated above, the idea was once somehow valid for analog copies. I.e. you were/are explicitly allowed to copy videos and music for friends and family (the famous "mixed tape") since you payed a little fee on the blank cassettes. Initially, this concept was also valid for music CDs but then the media industry began being worried about "lossless" digital copies (e.g. MP3 isn't lossless of course, but digital copies thereof are) and pushed through a copyright act that forbids to make copies of media protected by "effective technical means". So since then the situation is that you are forced to pay a fee for something that the copyright holder deny you by implementing a protection.

Actually the situation  has become even weirder nowadays. Typically most CDs don't have protection (wrong TOC, bad sectors) anymore and e.g. if you buy a CD on Amazon, you get to download the MP3 for free as well. But obviously Amazon is assuming that you are not allowed to copy the MP3s even though you paid your fee on all your HDs, MP3 players and what not. So it embeds a little personalized tracking information in each of your MP3s that is a bit tricky to detect and delete. I guess that would argue that you could create MP3s from your unprotected CD yourself legally correct but are still not allowed to copy their MP3s. But what nonsense is that? How does this help the copyright holder? I guess at some point, everybody lost track of what is allowed and what is not and now everybody assumes that everything is forbidden.

As a side note: while I could understand the fee for music/video media at least while it was not forbidden by other means, I never understood the fee for printers, scanners and copiers. I mean, nobody ever copied a normal (belletristic) book in western Europe (and scientific/educational use was always handled differently). I know that was a thing in parts of the Soviet Union in the 80s but never in (West) Germany where we had to (and still have to) pay these fees. There was (is?) even a regulation that decreasing the speed of a scanner would decrease the fee to pay for it. So most scanners worked slowed in Germany. But who ever used a scanner to commit any commercially relevant copyright violation? This whole concept was and is just totally insane.
The craziest part though is the algorithm used to distribute the money to the copyright holders as it's not like anybody would get any relevant amount of money back. Indeed, most surprisingly, I was very surprised to get back a very humble amount myself since I somehow got into their system as author for publishing my  thesis. It was a ridiculous sum of maybe 0,50€ (was still the time of German Marks I guess) but it shows that something is terribly wrong as my thesis was published on microfiche by a small scientific publisher (just to push the number of publications for my supervisor) and I doubt anybody ever bought it let alone copied it.

[tooki]

I'm not going to restate my positions any more, since this is a hornet's nest of stubbornness. I don't think any of you arte even remotely interested in taking a balanced look at things.

The fact is, my sister's voice is in recordings that are sold here and appear in the media, and it's fair for her to receive royalties for this.

If she's in "the media" then the media can pay the royalties. Why are they not paying? And, more importantly, why should I pay?

They are paying. (It's the hard-to-quantify royalties that the levies cover.) I only reiterated that it's fair to be paid royalties because of the general tone here, that artists essentially don't deserve to be paid at all. ("Do it as a hobby" means this...)

You are moving the goalposts all over the place.  This thread is about "private copying levies" and you said

The reason for copyright levies like this is to cover the situations that can't be covered by accurate accounting. So for example, the royalties for an album sale or for concert or radio time is easily calculated and thus can be accounted for specifically. It'd be impossible to do this for blank media by actual end use, so statistical averages are used.

It's not "benefits" like welfare, it's compensation for use of their creations that haven't been compensated otherwise, like making a mix tape for a friend, since this means the friend did not pay for your song, but is getting to enjoy it.

Private taxes are never justified and much less to pay for so-called, self-styled "artists". The artist I want to subsidize is the artist who can find the cure for cancer, or AIDS, or homelessness, or war, or tooth decay or ... And all those, if they get anything, it comes out of the general budget and not out of some bullshit private levy administered by a legal mafia.

You don’t know what “moving the goalpost” means, dude. You can disagree with my position without a) claiming bogus logical flaws, and b) being rude overall.