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

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... :-)