Compensation for private copy = yet another ghost fee: now also on the reconditioned and on the cloud! Nothing Beats Italian Government!

I don’t know how many of you know, but every time we buy a smartphone, a hard disk, a USB stick or any device with memory we are already paying a tax that nobody clearly tells you. It is called compensation for private copy and theoretically serves to compensate for musicians and authors because you “could” copy one of their songs or a movie about your device.

The problem is that nobody now does more copies of music or movies: we all use Spotify, Netflix, first videos and so on. Despite this, the Ministry of Culture has decided not only to keep this balzello born in the 90s, but to increase it by 20%. To make the idea: a 30 euro hard disk will pay almost 8 of it just tax.

As if that were not enough, the novelty is that now the compensation will also put it on refurbished devices, so you pay the same tax twice on the same object, and even on the cloud services such as Google Drive or Dropbox. That is, you pay a subscription to save your personal photos and documents, and a slice goes to them.

In the end we are talking about hundreds of millions of euros per year that end up in this mechanism. But the real question is: isn’t it yet another way for the state and the usual bodies to pocket money at the expense of citizens? Does it really make sense today to continue to call it “compensation for private copy” when the way of consuming music and films has completely changed? And above all: as long as we have to pay hidden taxes that always and only weigh on who buy and work?