Teosto (Finnish Composers’ Copyright Society) has officially requested that USB drives and mobile phones with MP3 playback function should join the products — such as DVDs and DVRs — with a recording/storage device royalty fee. Teosto has been fighting for the right to add the fees to mobile phones for two years now and now they want both external hard drives and thumb drives included as well. The proposal will now travel to Ministry of Education where the final decision is made.
Teosto has claimed that extensive amounts of copyrighted recordings are copied to both USB drives and mobile phones each year and therefore the composers have a right for a proper compensation. The fees would increase mobile phone prices up to 12,60 euros (approx. $16) for music phones such as the Nokia’s new touch-screen XpressMusic 5800 and presumably Apple iPhone.
Last year the same happened to HD DVD and Blu-ray discs that carry nowadays a fee of up to 1,89 euros per disc.
The proposed royalties for the year 2009 are as follows.
Mobile phones with MP3 playback:
1,4 euros for up to 512MB of internal memory
2,45 euros more than 512MB but up to 1GB of internal memory
3,45 euros more than 1GB but up to 20GB of internal memory
4,15 euros more than 20GB internal memory
Mobile phones that are advertised as music phones (eg. Nokia XpressMusic series, Sony Ericsson Walkman series):
2,4 euros for up to 512MB of internal memory
7,35 euros more than 512MB but up to 1GB of internal memory
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Result for: nokia xpressmusic
Although Nokia continues to struggle for market share in the US, sales overseas continue to grow and today the handset maker announced the launch of the Nokia XpressMusic 5800 , nicknamed “the Tube”, in what should be their largest release of the year.
The 5800 launches alongside the release of Nokia’s “Comes with Music” unlimited music download service and uses a Symbian S60 interface that Nokia has been demoing since last year.
The device is touchscreen and can be considered more of music player than a phone. Its dual speakers face outwards and there is a 3.5mm headphone jack, two features not found on many phones. Also included are 81 MB of on-board memory and a large 8GB microSD card as well as a guitar pick stylus.
Music playback includes protected WMA, MP3, AAC and there is word that the phone can use Windows Media Player 11 as its on-board player.
According to the source the XpressMusic 5800 includes “quad-band GSM (regional variants will support different 3G standards), 802.11b/g, GPS, a forward-facing 3.2 megapixel camera with flash and 30 fps video recording as well as a second backward-facing camera. The screen measures in at 3.2″ with a 640 x 360 resolution.”
