Will the cassette tape tax bring down the world's most developed music market?

In the space of five years, the Swedish record industry has gone from being on the ropes, with CD sales in freefall, to being the world's most developed music market. But now a legal practice is becoming established where computers and mobile phones risk being penalized with 100s of millions in fees, precisely because it is possible to store music on them.

Everyone knows that the record industry is in trouble because it has embraced new technology and listened to what consumers want. They want their music digitally, on their mobile phones and not to have to own it. Bye, bye copy in other words.

At the same time, the Swedish copyright system is chugging along according to old pre-digital instructions.

In court case after court case, more and more of the gadgets that we use to access these new services have been fined by the courts. It used to be called the cassette tape tax. It's actually called the private copying levy (PKE for those in the know). Which sounds about as modern. But now that the rights organization Copyswede is suing companies for fees for everything from computers to game consoles to mobile phones, the cassette concept is starting to feel misleading.

The electronics industry is now talking about a gigabyte tax. If your gadget has a storage space, you can expect Copyswede to want you to pay.

For consumers, it could amount to many hundreds of millions of kronor a year, or even billions. The gadgets that carry the new legal services are to be taxed for something that only Copyswede and our courts seem to think consumers are doing.

Do we want a continued strong Swedish music market and a copyright that is respected because consumers see and understand the point of it? Then it is high time that Sweden follows the example of our Nordic neighbors Finland and Norway, who compensate the rights holders for private copying according to a state budget-funded model.

It is time to consign the cassette tape tax to the trash heap and introduce the Nordic model for copy levies, including in Sweden.