France to Impose $1/Gigabyte Hard-Drive Tax

SysKoll writes: "Some obscure commission in France has decided to slap a 0.50 euro per GB tax on all hard drive used in appliances that can record video or audio broadcasts. The official announcement will be made on June 27. The tax is on bulk HDs so consumers will end up paying twice as much, or about $1 per GByte. All these taxes will go to a state agency supposed to redistribute it to copyright holders, i.e., disc labels and TV networks. This is quite frightening because if this test balloon is left unopposed, the rest of the tax-hungry European countries will follow, and the RIAA and MPAA will have a real-life example to show to Washington lawmakers. Here are the details: This tax applies not only to TiVo-like video 'time-shifting' recorders, but also to all the upcoming digital set-up boxes and HDTV sets that include a hard drive. As for audio appliances, MP3 players with an embedded hard drive will also be taxed. The 0.50 euro tax is imposed on hard drives sold to audio and video manufacturers, so by the time the manufacturers and distribution channels have added their mark up, the price increase will easily be doubled to a cool dollar per gigabyte (1 EUR = 0.93 USD or so these days). The news article (in French) is here. Use Babelfish if vous ne parlez pas French. Note that the French abbrev for Gb is Go. Here is an excerpt: 'According to our information, for a decoder of 80 GB, the [proposed tax] goes from 15 to 20 euros. And for a hi-fi system with 40 GB, they would be spread out from 20 to 25 euros. "But one has to expect that for the consumer, these prices will double," warns Bernard Heger, representative of Simavelec (Trade union of industries of electronic audio-visual equipment).'"

Comments

User-upgradable storage

[Deagol]

Assuming this only applies to drives sold with these units, manufacturors might start making easy at-home upgradable units. Imagine buying a Tivo with a 10GB drive, then being able to replace it with a commodity 160GB drive from Circuit City.

I can't imagine the computer industry allowing commodity hard drives to be taxed like this. There's just no way I could see it happening.

Does the tax keep up with price/size ratio?

[0x0d0a]

The price per gigabyte has dropped quickly over the past few years. Are legislators going to stay on top of this and have the price constantly go down, or is this going to end up inflating the price of hard drives to eight times their normal market price a couple of years down the road?

I'm really nervous about a system where the government is responsible for reducing the amount of money it gets -- and if it does nothing, gets more and more.

Re:Kick ass!

[Rick the Red]

Exactly. As in the case of the tax on blank CDs in Canada, this is gives you the legal right to copy any damn thing you want -- you already paid the royalty when you bought the media! (IANAL, but that's the arguement I'd make if they tried to charge me with "pirating")

Reality check

[babbage]

Just to be sure, can someone -- preferably from or at least in France -- confirm this story? I'm just suspicious because this sounds a lot like a permutation of the urban legend that makes the rounds every now and then. You know the one -- the hysterical, shrieking paranoid email chain forward claiming...

{ $agency } is planning to put a tax on { rand qw/emails bandwidth memory discs CPU/ }, because the growth of the internet has prevented { $agency } from earning the same revenues that they used to get from { rand qw/postage phones tarriffs whatever/ }, so you all have to contact { $local_goverment_official } letting them know that this will bring an end to modern society as we've all come to love it.

So, like, I'm willing to accept that this time it might be real, but considering how many times this hoax has made the rounds, I want to hear it from a reliable source rather than some web site I -- as an American that doesn't typically prowl the contemporary French tech/political web sites -- am reluctant to trust without at least getting a second opinion.

Why I'm asking for a trustworthy second opinion on Slashdot, well, let's just dance around that one eh? :-)
(And while you're at it, pardon the pseudo-code, I'm just trying to get the idea across... :-)

Beauty of the EU

[leastsquares]

The French people will just pop over the border to Spain or Belgium, or somewhere, and buy the untaxed gigabytes there...

...so unless the tax is sufficiently low, the French government will soon realise that they are losing more in sales taxes than they are gaining in Gb taxes.

the drive becomes the media

[teambpsi]

i suspect that more likely, the drive "bays" will become more like option-slots in the devices.

of course they are trying to impose taxes on the CDR's too