In Germany, You Pay Extra To Appease The Rights-Holders
When you buy blank media, hard drives, printers, or USB drives in Germany, you not only pay for the device or item, but also an extra fee that goes right into the pocket of rights-holders, represented by a collecting organization.
Even if you do not plan on reproducing anything, for instance by using the storage for your backups, you still pay extra. This is similar to not owning a TV, but still having to pay for it which all Germans will have to do come 2013.
In Germany, you have the right to make a private copy of media that you have bought, provided that you do not circumvent copy protection. And it is this right that led to the extra payments.
I have already mentioned that you pay extra even if you do not copy at all. But even if you want to copy, you may not be able to do so, as you are not allowed to make a private copy if the media is copy protected. This again means that you pay for a right that you may not be able to take advantage of or don't make use of at all.
Yesterday news broke that two collecting organizations have announced plans to increase the fees Germans pay when they buy USB flash drives. From 0,10 Euro for each flash drive sold to a maximum of 1.56€ per device and for memory cards to a maximum of 1.95€ per card. Remember, that is paid on top of the actual price of the drive. Cheap flash drives start at about 6 Euro, which would mean that you would have to pay about a third of the device's price on top of it if the highest fee is added to the price.
If you thought this was crazy, then wait until you see the following figures:
- Smartphones without touchscreen - 12 Euro extra
- Smartphones with touchscreen and memory < 8 GB - 16 Euro extra
- Smartphones with touchscreen and memory > 8 GB - 36 Euro extra
There seem to be fees on everything that you can store data on (yes paper included). Many Germans cope with the situation by making their purchases in neighboring countries where people do not have to pay these extra fees.
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.