This will drive a moderate increase in phone prices and marks a significant achievement for music and video artists, who've lobbied hard for such a tax.

The decree will go into effect as early as the end of this month, according to Pavel Zeman, head of the authorship rights department at the Culture Ministry.

Up to this point, fees from authorship rights were levied on particular downloads, but now all mobiles with music and video capabilities will be subject to a tax, regardless of whether the owner plans to download authorship rights–protected content.

Counter to its original plan of imposing a 3 percent import tax on these phones, the Culture Ministry in the end decided to charge 6 Kč (27 U.S. cents) per 4 gigabytes of memory.

As a result, the new fee will increase the prices of these mobiles by tens of crowns rather than hundreds of crowns.

Telecommunications operators confirmed that prices of selected phones would increase and many insisted that creating an authorship rights fee is ridiculous because it will effectively subject ring tones to a double tax.

"We already pay 12 percent for particular ring tones to the authorship rights association," said Jakub Hrabovský, a spokesman for Vodafone ČR.

Money maker

OSA, an authorship rights association, and Integram, a union of performing artists, have been lobbying for an 'authorship tax' on mobile phones for more than a year.

OSA's CEO Jana Bärová said that artists' revenues from authorship fees are lower here than in other countries despite the fact that demand for video and music content is increasing.

Artists are particularly interested in taxing mobile music content because their revenues are so much higher than for music played on the radio.

For example, "On My Head" by Dan Bárta was downloaded 126,000 times last year on mobile phones and earned the musician more than 500,000 Kč. The same song received more than 800 hours of radio airtime, yet only earned Bárta about 40,000 Kč.

While ring tones are certainly a profitable business for musicians, they are a gold mine for mobile operators. Every download costs between 40 and 80 Kč, of which operators get 60 percent.