HP CD Burner Lawsuit :: GCSE Business Marketing Coursework

HP CD Burner LawsuitHewlett-Packard Hits Legal Snag all over Its CD Burners in GermanyCompact Disk burners have been a controversial product for the last several years because of there ability for making pirating of calculating machine softw are and unison CDs a very easy operation. The Hewlett-Packard Corporation has become the first major company to be attacked by the German Law which requires firms to pay fees for making CD burners which in turn can be used for pirating music CDs from music illegally downloaded from the internet. The music Industry estimated that approximately five billion dollars in sales revenue was lost last year due to the pirating of music CDs. Many other European countries have laws similar to Germanys that are meant to protect the authors and musicians legal ownership of their work by punishing the people who score the equipment used to carry out pirating activities. Although a problem is that these laws were created quite sometime ago and wer e aimed at such things as tape recorders and video players. Germanys wooing against HP is the first time we have seen these older laws being put against modern day technology. What needs to be examined in this case is the distinct inequality that this new pirating has. Unlike the past the majority of the pirated CDs are created for personal use and not sold on the black market. People are downloading music from such programs as the infamous Napster and creating their own CDs, which results in a zero profit for the music industry. HP was ordered by the German government to pay a fee of 30 marks or $12.