Economic Impact of Copyright Levies for Cloud Computing
Our Contribution
In view of potential copyright reforms at the European level, this study undertook an investigation into the potential costs associated with expanding copyright levies to the cloud. In doing so, we forecasted the existing cloud computing markets up to 2020 and applied existing copyright levy tariffs, so to get a grasp of the potential costs of the levy system to cloud storage services.
Impact
We found that extra costs incurred by expanding the existing copyright levy system to Cloud computing would be substantial. The extra costs associated with expanding the copyright levy system to Cloud based storage service usage in eight EU countries alone could be in the next five years alone over 2.4 billion Euro. These findings are currently used by public policy advocates to approach European policy makers.