The polemic application of surcharges on the electronic equipment that allows the reproduction of copyrighted works and files, is again brought with the decision of the European Court of Justice of 27 June 2013.

In the scope of the litigation that opposes a German company of copyrights against electric and electronic German companies, the Court of the European Justice interpreted the concept of reproduction in the Directive 2001/29 as including the reproduction done through a printer or by a personal computer, when that equipment are connected to each other.

For that matter and according to the decision now published, it is possible to the EU-Members to create a system within which an equitable compensation should be paid by the people ( read, their manufacturers and importers) that have an equipment that contributes, in a non-autonomous way, for the process of copyrighted works reproduction or other protected material, because those persons can charge the cost of the surcharge to their customers.

Remember that the Directive 2001/29 impose that EU-Members foreseen in their legislations the exclusive right of the authors to authorize or to forbid direct or indirectly, temporary or permanently the reproduction in any ways and under any form of their copyrighted works. However, this right can be limited in certain situations through the payment of an equitable compensation to those authors.

In the German case, the manufacturer of the devices intended to do copies, should pay to the work owner an equitable compensation, in order to compensate the possibility of the device to carry out the said copies. The surcharge is fixed in between € 38,35 and  € 613,56, depending on the number of copies done per minute and of the possibility of the copies are done/or not  in color.

Portugal

In Portugal, the Law of the Private Copy only imposes the payment of a surcharge for "support" (Cd and DVD).

Please note that in 2012, the Portuguese Socialist Party  presented a Project-Law for revision of the Law of the Private Copy, that foreseen the application of a surcharge to the manufacturers, retailers, deliverers and wholesale dealers of any equipment that allowed to store information. However, the proposal was dropped.

Currently, and because of the pressures of the associations of protection of the copyrights, the Government presented to the National Council of Culture (Conselho Nacional de Cultura) a new proposal that foresees the widening of the surcharges on private copy to the majority of the electric and electronic equipment that allows to reproduce copyrighted works.

Although its content is not public, it was already advanced by the media that the surcharge will be applicable depending on the different supports and devices, which allows making copies of music, video, photos or software. Printers, multifunction, scanners, readers and recorders of CD and DVD, external hard disks, Pens USB, memory cards, and hard disks when integrated in computers, will also pay a surcharge.

The companies dedicated to electric and electronic equipment will have to provide again the competent entities with clarifications regarding the economic impact that such measures represent in the current economic framework.