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

Go?

[Otter]

Note that the French abbrev for Gb is Go.

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.

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.

That's absurd

[inerte]

How about tax my armoire? It holds records, you know.

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... :-)

Re:Reality check

[kigrwik]

Grab your best babelfish::legalese and check there:

http://www.legalis.net/jnet/2001/rem_copie_prive e/ rem_copie_privee.htm

I can't find the exact articles in the law it refers to , as they've been edited out from the official site:

http://legifrance.gouv.fr => 'Loi' and search for "2001-624"

However it seems real enough. We already pay taxes on the CD-Rs we buy. I *think* that if you can prove you buy them for commercial purpose, you can get a refund.

Well, it also means that I can download and rip all I want, since I'm paying for it !
Maybe we'll have a "tax" for shoplifting too ?

Re:Sounds like a good idea

[Dyolf Knip]

As long as citizens are given immunity from copyright lawsuits using hard drives

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.

Re:Sounds like a good idea

[Dyolf Knip]

It doesn't really make sense to decrease the cost due to decreased media costs.

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?

If true, interesting things will happen.

[jotaeleemeese]

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.

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