This is incorrect, however, levies are only intended to compensate for private copying that is legally allowed in many jurisdictions.
Industry players continue to lobby for reform of the system which they argue is outdated and does not reflect the rise in streaming services which has caused a drop in private copying.
This ignores other distribution channels such as the Internet, and it disproportionally benefits popular artists and publishers of the related products.
This funding is usually executed by the same entities (collecting societies) that distribute the levy money to individual authors.
The discrepancy between reality and the assumption underlying a levy system is growing as the World Wide Web matures, with pervasive user-supplied content, from Wikipedia to YouTube.
But a price based on units of information (bits, or megabits) is not fair either, as for instance a DVD can be used to store a film, a computer game, a large amount of documents, or measurement data.
An implementation question that arises is whether the tax applies to any type of copyrighted work or is restricted to a limited field such as music.
[5] Examples of countries operating such schemes: Australia had a public levy on cassette tapes.
The legislation establishing the levy was passed in 1989, challenged in the High Court of Australia in Australian Tape Manufacturers Association Ltd v Commonwealth.
As of 1 February 2010, these fees are applicable for the following:[6] A blank media levy was introduced in Canada in 1997, by the addition of Part VIII, "Private Copying", to the Canadian Copyright Act.
[10] The Pirate Party of Canada, or the PPCA, has called for the scrapping the levy, as there are plenty of non-piracy related uses for CDs and it is unjust to punish Canadians who don't use them for these purposes.
Article 1245 of Civil Code of Russian Federation "Remuneration for free reproduction of phonograms and audiovisual products for private purposes" ("Вознаграждение за свободное воспроизведение фонограмм и аудиовизуальных произведений в личных целях") mandates a fee, which is to be distributed in the following proportion: 40% to the authors, 30% to the singers, 30% to the manufacturers of the media.
In practice, this fee had not been charged until after the Regulation of the Government of Russian Federation 829 from October 14, 2010, which mandated a uniform 1% tax on computers, blank optical disks, memory sticks, TVs, video and audio recorders, radios, mobile phones, etc.
The controversial decision of the government to award the collected funds to the Russian Union of Rights-Holders for further distribution was criticized by the public and disputed in a lawsuit.
Non-commercial includes such things as resale not in the course of business, perhaps of normal use working copies which are no longer wanted.
102-873(I), September 17, 1992: "In the case of home taping, the [Section 1008] exemption protects all noncommercial copying by consumers of digital and analog musical recordings" .
102-780(I), August 4, 1992: "In short, the reported legislation [Section 1008] would clearly establish that consumers cannot be sued for making analog or digital audio copies for private noncommercial use".
The UK Government's view was that "levies or other compensation are neither required nor desirable in the context of a narrow provision that causes minimal harm.
Furthermore, particularly in the current economic climate, it is not right to extract more money from the pockets of hard pressed consumers.
"[22] The British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (BASCA), the Musicians' Union, and UK Music challenged the introduction of these regulations, and brought an application for judicial review.
Their application succeeded when, in June 2015, the High Court ruled that the regulations were unlawful because of a flawed impact assessment.