Last weeks the Apple company was accused of not paying billions of dollars in taxes for the money held in accounts outside the US, and now the French state waxes from Apple 5 million euros as taxes for the sale of iPad tablets in 2011. The tax is collected by the SACEM organization and basically we are talking about sums of money that must be paid by all manufacturers of devices capable of transferring/citing/using material protected by copyright legislation.
The French association SACEM, which controls royalties paid out to authors, announced this week that Apple failed to pay 5 Million euros in royalties taxes on iPads sold in 2011. To give a bit of a background, the copie privée is a tax in several countries including France & Germany that is applied to all digital devices that can transfer, read, or otherwise make use of copyrighted material. The tax goes to the SACEM, which then takes the lump sum of all the taxes collected and deals them out to authors, creators, producers, actors, etc. accordingly.
SACEM collects the money owed for this tax and distributes it to digital content producers, and Apple is the latest company to come under the organization's sights. The tax is applied both in France and in Germany, so we are not talking about a singular case and Apple will most likely have to pay it, because it certainly pays the same for iPhones or MacBooks.
