It’s official, refurbished smartphones will cost more with a new tax already criticized – Freebox Universe

The Senate adopted the private copying tax on reconditioned equipment withina bill to green digital, a measure that is far from unanimous.

A tax adopted reluctantly, to allow the implementation of other measures for a greener digital. This Tuesday in the Senate, the amendment extending to sellers of refurbished devices the payment of the royalty for private copying was adopted. For the rapporteur of the text, Senator Patrick Chaize, integrating this new tax is a “mess”, but must not “hide the profound advances and numerous guarantees by the bill ”.

Thus, for example, the tax applied to a refurbished smartphone with a memory between 32 and 64 GB will be of the order of 7.20 €, against 12 € for a new device. In the case of a refurbished mobile with more storage, the tax will be 8.40 €. This measure was the occasion for clashes between players in the world of refurbished products and the cultural sector. ” Putting an additional burden on reconditioned products goes against the ambitions of the law. It is a questioning of an entire repair sector », Regretted last summer Benoît Varin, president of RCube, and co-founder of Recommerce.

As a reminder, the purpose of this tax is to finance the remuneration of authors and performers for the reproduction of their offers on certain types of recording media. Thus, devices making it possible to copy a work, in particular by equipping itself with a storage space, are concerned by this royalty.

A strongly criticized measure

By imposing this tax on reconditioned equipment, protests were quick to be heard. For example, the consumer association UFC-Que Choisir had seized the Council of State but his appeal was quickly rejected. The parliamentarians involved in the creation of the bill for a greener digital also expressed regret regarding the implementation of this measure.

“ The points of disagreement with the government are real. They are sometimes important, especially with regard to the point of remuneration for private copying. However, I think that they are in the minority and that they do not justify sacrificing the majority of the provisions that we could see entering into the Law. », Recalled Patrick Chaize during the examination of this bill. While the bill aims to encourage the reuse of terminals, a price increase seems via a tax then seems counterproductive.

” I regret the private copying levy, which again hits products from recycling when it already applies to new products. Taxing repackaged products is in contradiction with the environmental objectives and ambitions of this text, but clearly, the government and the majority deputies preferred to satisfy categorical interests, in this case those of cultural players. »Laments Senator Laurence Muller-Bronn.

For the Minister of Culture, used smartphones should be subject to the private copying levy that applies to many devices, including smartphones, touch pads, computers, hard drives, USB keys, blank DVDs and blank CDs . “Private copying is crucial and makes it possible to remunerate creators, but also to strongly support cultural activities in our territories. Encouraging the purchase of reconditioned products cannot be done to the detriment of culture ”, explained Roselyne Bachelot.

For their part, the players in the repackaging consider this taxation as a threat to their already weakened sector, and point the finger at the fact that a product is doubly affected by this tax, when it is new, then when it is repackaged. , but also the fact that private copying appears less legitimate at the time of streaming platforms where the user no longer owns the content, content for which the majors are elsewhere already paid under agreements with the platforms in question.

Source: Zdnet