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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).'"
I should move to France. With MP4 encoding
I'll be able to get unlimited music/movies for
life for a one time fee of a few bucks! I'd
think the MPAA would be pissed about this.
Wondering about that? Me too. Apparently it stands for "gigaoctet". I guess "byte" is a non-native word so it had to be replaced with a certifiably French equivalent.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
The French tax everything anyway, so I'm not horriblement surprised at their position.
It just reminds me one more time why I left that corruption-riddled cant-even-beat-Senegal-in-soccer former colonial empire...
"Piter, too, is dead."
Indeed. Such is the current situation up in Canada, I believe. But I have to wonder how long it would be before the -AA's start demanding you pay for your cake and for eating it as well.
Furthermore, Moore's Law dictates that the dollar value (or rather, Euro value) of this tax will very soon become wildly out of proportion to the cost of the drive itself. When terabyte drives reach the price of today's 100GB drives (4, _maybe_ 5 years?), this current tax would increase the cost of the drive by 900% ($1000 tax on a $125 drive). How often are they going to adjust it to reflect the decreased cost of media, if at all? Canada's CD-R tax is going up, despite the ever-decreasing price of the discs.
So while it might be convenient today, it certainly won't be tomorrow.
Dyolf Knip
So the amount of stuff it is economical to store rises no further on the say-so of a bunch of rich execs who have nothing to do with data storage? I sure hope we'll never need anything more than 100 or 200 GB, since nobody'll be able to afford the taxes on it. Kindly imagine what would have happened if they'd tried this when Napster started up. As I recall, 20GB was a good sized drive at the time, so to get an equivalent tax on a 100GB drive today, you'd have to tax $5 per gig. Which means that you wouldn't be able to get a 100GB drive today for less than $500. Swell. Let's shaft IBM, Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital, and everyone else in that business to protect people from copying bits. How noble. And you don't need to point out that this tax is only on Tivo's and whatnot. It's only a matter of time before they try to apply this to computer storage in general.
Terabyte hard drives/able to download entire movies in minutes
Are you implying that this will never happen? Lemme guess, 5 years ago you said that 56k was the fastest Internet connection the population would ever be able to have. And 10 years ago you said that we'd never ever have affordable 100GB hard drives. For your information, the technology to store a terabyte or move an entire DVD over the Internet in minutes already exists. It is simply too expensive to succeed in the market. To look at the past 50 years in computers and say with complete and total confidence, "Oh _that_ will never ever happen" is hubristic in the extreme.
What's the alternative?
Uh, well, gee, maybe you could actually not tax a product on the grounds that it might be used inappropriately and cause a potential loss of income to someone? They don't do it for any other product, even ones with anti-IP potential, I fail to see why hard drives and CD's should be any different.
Do we start door-to-door FBI raids?
Why not? If it's illegal to copy bits, then go after the people doing it. This tax is not unlike giving everyone a year in prison on the basis that some of them would end up there anyway and by doing it this way you save the trouble and expense of actually trying and prosecuting them.
Do we just let them go out of business?
And since when is it my responsibility to keep potentially doomed businesses alive? Or the government's? Since when is it anybody's responsibility but the business in question?
the media companies will come up with their own solution to the problem
They already have. They buy legislation that gets them money for nothing and convince suckers like you that it's good for you.
if not, the government likely is going to be forced to do something
Explain the logic underlying that conclusion, please. Music and movie conglomerates are not critical industries. They do not employ vast amounts of workforce whose skills are useless without them. They are not irreplacable. Dollar-wise, they do not even count for much. Why on earth is it absolutely imperative that these companies continue to make a profit?
Dyolf Knip
French consumers with a clue (I hope there are many) will order their stuff from other EU countries. Now finally they have got an incentive to polish that English, German or Spanish.
Secondly, artists not belonging to the enterteinment cartels would be amazingly stupid if they don't claim their part of the share, which if it is denied, will give them a huge case to go to the European courts to fight this appaling piece of pseudo legislation.
Thirdly, French consumers should demand to store whatever they want in the medium of their choice. They will be paying blanket royalties, they should get blanket access.
To be honest I would not be against an scheeme like that: you pay for media, get taxed, the money goes to the artists (or their leeches, if the artists don't have guts to organize themselves I could not care less) and then you can put whatever you want in that media without ever been bothered by one of the cartels' lawyers.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.