According to The Register HP must pay for copyright because they produce the hardware...
Hewlett-Packard has been fined by the German courts for shipping hardware capable of creating pirate music CDs. The company will have to cough up DM3.60 ($1.60) for each computer it has sold since February 1998. HP won't say how many machines that is, but it could easily run into the hundreds of thousands. |
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German law imposes a levy on all equipment capable of recording music at home. Tape deck manufacturers, cassette makers, etc. all pay up and have been doing so for years. The levy is paid to copyright control agencies who share it among artists. It's design to compensate musicians - albeit in a small way - from the effects of piracy.
Only now has it occurred to anyone that CD-R and CD-R/W drives in PCs can also record music, and so HP has been singled out for treatment.
HP will have to pay DM12 ($5.40) for every machine it ships with a device that can store music - in other words, all of them.
So because HP creates CDR drives, they have to pay for the illegal cd's created with it... And what about IBM, Compaq, Dell or whatever... more coming?
