taxing my patience

Buying blank cds to back up my ever-growing collection of photographs, I am reminded of university days when I studied Adam’s Smiths canons of taxation.

Just a few of many

Every blank cd sold in Spain is subject to el canon – popularly referred to as “un impuesto por si acaso“. That pretty much describes it: a “just-in-case tax”.

rights and royalties

When I wrote the previous post and thought about ‘tags’ for it, I included the Spanish expression derechos de autor. For non-Spanish speakers, it’s possibly worth pointing out the ambiguity of that phrase.

Literally, it looks like “author’s rights”, but in fact it can translate as both “copyright” and “royalties”. This can be confusing, but probably makes some kind of sense.

copyrights and wrongs

Some years ago in Spain there was a clamp down on illegal photocopying.

At the copy shop at the end of our road, they had always been amenable to making multiple copies of whole books – very useful for penniless English teachers who had managed to filch a single text book from their last employer and were now using this to go it alone with private classes. But suddenly the shop changed hands and it was rumoured