Jens of Sweden legal trouble
p2p news / p2pnet:- "It’s not our problem that the record industry hasn’t come up with its own solution," Jens Nylander, the owner of Jens of Sweden is quoted as saying in The Local.
Nylander, an indie mp3 player manufacturer, founded Jens of Sweden in February 2003. For Christmas in the following year, Nylander was offering the Excentrique MP-400 – plated in 24K gold – for a paltry $1,199.00 : )
In the quote, he’s referring to the fact he’s in trouble for "flatly refusing to pay a controversial copying charge" levied on his products.
Cassette compensation was introduced to compensate copyright owners whose music or films were copied to a different format for private use, says the story, going on:
"Last year, 85 million kronor (about 1$3,925,760 at the time of writing) in cassette compensation was collected and redistributed by the copyright organisation Copyswede," says The Local.
"The law also applies to mp3 players but Jens Nylander told Svenska Dagbladet that it was outdated and unjust. He said that there are several large companies which do not pay the charge, including Apple with its iPod, but Copyswede is only taking legal action against his company and one other."
Nylander says he thinks compensation should be built into the price. But Svenska Dagbladet quotes Copyswede’s Hans-Olov Dahlén as saying his organisation isn’t just picking on Jens of Sweden. "They [Jens of Sweden] have clearly stated that they will not consider paying, so we’re going to court. We’re in discussions with the other companies. As the law stands, people have the right to make copies for private use, so the copyright owners should be fairly compensated."
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See:-
The Local – MP3 company rejects copyright charge, September 14, 2005
mp3 player – Jens of Sweden: cooking, September 23, 2005
Excentrique MP-400 – Even MORE Xmas goodies, October 31, 2004
September 15th, 2005 at 2:23 pm
…But Svenska Dagbladet quotes Copyswede’s Hans-Olov Dahlén … “They [Jens of Sweden] have clearly stated that they will not consider paying, so we’re going to court. We’re in discussions with the other companies. As the law stands, people have the right to make copies for private use, so the copyright owners should be fairly compensated.”
If people have the right to make copies for private use, then the copyright owners are not entitled to additional compensation. Presuming that it’s legitimate private use, a person is unlikely going to be playing the same song on his CD player, .mp3 player, computer, cassette deck, reel-to-reel, 8-track, phonograph, victrola, and wax cylinder recorder concurrently.
CDs and cassettes are individual media containers that are easily distributed. If one were to treat an .mp3 player similarly that means if you were going to ’share’ your music with it, that means physically giving the .mp3 player to someone else. So, unlike CDs and cassettes, you are not just giving away the media container, but also the device to extract the media from it’s container and deliver it to the consumer. So, the analogy of regarding this fee as equivalent to the fee on blank media is rather distorted.
If the .mp3 player has little memory cards that could be traded and swapped, it would make sense to impose a fee on those, but not on a hard drive or large memory chips, permanently installed in a device.