In the shadow world of the courts, the cassette tape tax remains unchallenged
Today, the Södertörn District Court ordered Telia to pay SEK 107 million to Copyswede for non-payment of private copying levies for iPhones sold between 2009 and 2016. This is one of many long-standing legal disputes in this area, the legal details of which we do not need to go into. Instead, the central question is why should you, as a consumer, pay hundreds, or even thousands, of kronor to Copyswede for every smartphone you buy in Sweden? Is it because you are making digital copies of all the CDs you still buy? Or is it because digitization has forced our courts into the Platonic cave?
Plato's famous parable where a group of people interpret the world through the shadows cast by light on the walls of the cave is apt. I have no doubt that today's judgment is legally correct. It's just that the conclusions drawn by the district court, based on the applicable law, do not match the reality it is meant to regulate. Parts of the judgment are, given the total market dominance of digital services, laughable. Or how about the fact that services like Spotify would harm authors? Or that three kronor per gigabyte for smartphones is fair compensation for the theoretical possibility of making your own copies of legally acquired and cleared music? We are talking here about fees that can range low north of a thousand kronor per phone.
Today's judgment shows that the remuneration system for private copying has reached its limits and that there is a great need for reform. Everyone knows that consumers have largely switched to digital services where rights have already been cleared and compensated. The fact that they now have to pay twice for their music consumption with a flat fee on smart phones or pay even though they do not use their phone to listen to music, risks lowering public confidence in copyright and reinforcing the image of it as irrelevant. Which, of course, is the opposite of what either we or, for that matter, Copyswede's principals themselves want.
If the Swedish digital media market is to remain strong in the future, a balanced, fair and, not least, digitally adapted copyright is required that respects consumers, suppliers and rights holders. Otherwise, Swedish copyright will continue to be lined with endless and increasingly incomprehensible disputes in the shadowy world of the intellectual property courts.
It is therefore of the utmost importance that the incoming government prioritizes the review of the private copying levy announced by a unanimous Committee on Economic Affairs last spring.