Amazon is sued for millions of dollars for selling blank media to Austrians who might have used them to make private copies of copyrighted music and movies. The Austrian copyright organisation Austro-Mechana brought Amazon to the European court to claim a copyright levy. The organisation claimed nearly $2 million in levies from Amazon.
That's for the first half of 2004 for the sales of blank media in Austria. Austro-Mechana,also demanded access to accounting data. That data should provide sales numbers for claims for the entire period of 2002 till 2004 which would be a multitude of the $ 2 million.
Amazon argued that assuming that people would use the blank media for copying copyrighted content would be unfair. The European Court of Justice didn't agree and ruled that such a levy in the European Union is fair in some cases . In case it's clear that the blank media would not be used for copying copyrighted content the levy would not be allowed, for all other cases it would.
Unfortunately the court did not clearly state how to decide for what purpose the media is bought. In the case of Amazon vs Austro-Mechana, the Austrian court has to decide whether customers were intending to use the blank media to make copies of copy protected content.
It's clearly nearly impossible to track all users and find out with what purpose they had when they bought the blank media, so the Austro-Mechana will have a tough job to make Amazon pay. Nevertheless, the Austrian organisation already won several cases in lower courts against Amazon. In the end, these cases forced Amazon to appeal. Due to the latest EU ruling it will be up to the Austrian Supreme Court to finally decide if Amazon will have to pay the levies or not.
