A row between politicians, content owners and electronics firms has been unleashed in Switzerland after it was revealed a 'federal arbitration commission' had decided to introduce a levy on the sale of all MP3 players to be returned to content owners.
As previously reported, this kind of levy, often referred to as an 'iPod tax', has been considered in a number of countries in the last eighteen months, and is a digital version of the levies added in some countries to the sale of blank cassettes or CDRs.
The levy is based on the argument that when a consumer buys a CD they only obtain a licence to listen to those tracks on that CD. By this argument, if a consumer makes additional copies, even for personal use, they should pay an extra licence fee for each copy. A practical way of doing this is to charge a levy on the cassettes, discs or players onto which the copies are made.
Royalty bodies in Switzerland, where levies are already charged on cassettes and CDRs, have been lobbying for a levy to be added to digital music player sales for some time. Authorities agreed to such charges last month, and they are now due to be introduced on 1 Mar.
However the Swiss Association For Information, Communications And Organization Technology, whose members include Apple, IBM and Sony, have reacted angrily to that decision, and have asked the country's Federal Court to postpone the introduction of the levy for sixty days in a bid to present their side of the argument.
The trade body says the levies proposed are too high, and that the levy distinctions the proposed system makes between the kinds of players (ie those with flash memory and those with hard disks) don't make sense. They also reckon the levy is unfair on consumers.
The trade body's President, Jurg Stutz, told Swiss news agency swissinfo: "There are many things that we intend to attack. For example, we feel the tariffs are astronomically high. The manufacturers certainly can't cover this. With the margins they have today, they cannot absorb the extra cost".
A levy of this kind (which unlike the levy being discussed in France does not legitimatise P2P file sharing, it merely legitimises the transfer of legally bought tracks from one device to another for personal use) does seem a bit unfair - given that some music fans will find themselves in the situation where they are essentially paying for the privilege to transfer tracks from a PC to an iPod, even though they bought the tracks with the specific intention of listening to them on the iPod in the first place. Whether the electronics firms will successfully halt and then overturn the levy plans remains to be seen.