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Germany Mulls A Copyright Levy + VAT For PCs
Willard B. Trophy writes "How does a US$13 plus an extra 16% tax on computers sound? That's what intense lobbying by publishing industry groups has forced the German government to consider. UPI has the story."
ecks-tore-shun
-- Insert wisdom here:
But computers do have legitimate uses other than music/movie/software piracy. Some people do actually buy legit software to run on their computers and do legit things on them such as writing letters, email, browsing the net.
I personally think that law is crap but thankfully I don't live in Germany.
It sounds like the German government wants all computers to be built by big foreign companies, and not small German shops.
This level of taxation would cut into the small margin most small shops make. That means no more guys who come up with creative solutions for problems, no more friendly service. Just packages and long queues waiting for some ignoramus at tech support when the thing breaks. (Plus the shipping time.)
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
From the article:
"Blank magnetic media, especially recordable CDs"
Yes, because CDs are magnetic...
But on a more serious note, they are calling everybody who buys a computer a theif. No questioning use. No checking if the computer will even be connected to the internet.
Everybody. Every man, woman and child. Every office assistant, every student.
Let's pretend that the computers sold are $700. That's not including the monitor (which is used to see what pirated files you want to download), printer (which is used to print labels for your pirated CDs), or any other peripherals (such as your speakers, used to play the latest pirated Rammestien singles). They get $13 right off the bat. Now, let's add another $112 for the 16%. That means that on a $700 computer, you have to pay an additional $130, not including peripherals / other sales taxes.
I work at a retail store. We sell about 6 computers per week. Multiply that by the amount of stores in Germany, and that number by $130.
And the recording industry needs how much more money to pay for the pirated CD sales losses?
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
Im so glad I live in a country where Im innocent until proven guilt by a court of my peers.
errr... Im sorry Mr Ashcroft, your right.. I was having evil thoughts, Im guilty of thought crime. Yes we are at war with the people from the east.
It's a large step toward the end of free personal computing. You have to register your computer to pay this tax, right? If you don't pay your tax, you lose your computer or some other fine occurs. To make sure you paid your tax, the computer has to be identifiable. There you have it - no computing without a license. It comes in small steps. Evil, very evil. It's not about the money, it's about control and much larger money that will be lost by certian entrenched intrests when control is lost.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Otherwise, don't charge me for PreCrime(TM).
Are these fees going to be levied on a pre-manufactured machine as a whole? Or on just processors? Would you be able to circumvent this by building your own PC?
So, what makes the item a computer? If someone goes into a different store to buy each part and assembles a computer, which store do they get charged the extra $13 at? The one they bought the cpu at? Well, that could be an upgrade. So could a new motherboard. In fact, the only thing I think they could use their tenuous logic to justify would be a hard drive. In that case, what if I build a computer with two drives?
Aside from the logic problem of defining what part should be taxed as the computer, this ignores, for example, servers. Do people installing servers at an ISP get to ask for their $13 back for every box they build to serve, say, the billing system or internal database? Who tracks that?
Finally, I find the article's mention of precedent interesting. The article mentions that none of the money collected to date in Canada has yet to get to the members its supposed to go to.
While the article has a decided tilt and is certainly not unbiased reporting, I find the collective sum to be appalling, and hope the measure gets a sound thrashing, along with whoever proposed it.
What better way to jump start the economy then to impose a tax and divert the money to...oh...nothing useful.
The aforementioned Canadian collective has yet to distribute to its members even one tax dollar of the tens of millions it inexplicably hoards.
Well, since the industry has proposed these new levies, and they havent been implemented, it makes a fair bit of sense that nobody's recieved money from it yet.
.
Everyone pays when people steal. You might not steal, but you have to pay for it. When something is stolen from a store, the company has 2 choices: take a loss (maybe go out of business), or pass on the costs.
The same thing happens with insurance. Are you contemplating insurance fraud? You are making everyone else's premiums go up when you do it.
So even if computers have legit uses, and even if you don't break the law, there are enough people out there misusing computers and breaking the law that bottoms lines are being affected. Naturally, businesses don't like this and are working to change it. The only way you can do anything useful about it is prove that the loss is negligible, and to stop illegal copying.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
OOH! I just loved this:
:)
"In essence, copyright is a temporary monopoly on creative work granted to the authors, publishers and distributors of such products. It is intended to compensate them for their efforts and encourage them to continue to create. Yet, the disintermediation brought on by digital technologies threatens to link author and public directly, cutting out traditional content brokers such as record companies or publishers.
"This is the crux of the battle royal. Middlemen are attempting -- in vain -- to sustain their dying and increasingly parasitic industries and refusing to adapt and re-invent themselves. Everyone else watches in amazement and dismay the consequences of this grand folly: innovation is thwarted, consumers penalized, access to works of art, literature and research constrained."
That's a lovely summation, IMO.
Anyway, Germany gets computers without VAT??????
Lucky bastards! In the UK we pay 17.4% VAT on PCs, and always have.
The copyright levvy, sounds good to me, though:
"Here's your 35 quid, now fuck off and quit yer whining."
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
Wow, that is incredible. 16% VAT? Because the new computer could *possibly* be used for copyright violations? What a crock...
These ideas obviously aren't new - I understand Canada has a "tax" on blank CDRs and other countries have similar laws in place or under consideration - although this German proposal is quite extreme.
However, you have to question the fundamental motivation of the various industry associations. Should their motivation be to maintain/replace revenue from new streams (the path they seem to have chosen), to generate new forms of revenue (online music sales being the most obvious), or to make sure they get what they are due from their current streams (antipiracy).
It seems the option they have taken is the one of least benefit to the users. As someone who pays for CDs, I am paying a "tax" to subsidise the pirates. And I get nothing new for the money - I am just unwillingly propping up their obsolete business model.
Seems poorly thought out to me.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
The money will be used to reimburse copyright holders -- artists, performers, recording companies, publishers and movie studios -- for unauthorized copying thought to weigh adversely on sales.
Well I hope some of it also goes to Microsoft, for my illegitamate copy of Office.
Or does this tax just go to those whose products are not primarily aimed at being used through a computer? If so, surely the most legitamate tax position would be the internet or (as has already been done) recorable media. It seems daft to attack something just because it might be a threat, or is this Germanys answer to a pre-emptive strike?
There are many people who believe that the entire purpose of the internet is to leverage their copyright holdings for unlimited controll and profit. With information, and those who believe in DRM - it is eaither an all or nothing game - they will not give up controll to some govt collection agency, and that game will lielky be first played out to the end from the USA because that's where the forefront of the transformation to the information age is still happening, and that's where the biggest current potential for profit still is.
Renember, information is so easy to manipulate and process, that there can't be much middle ground. Either all of it has to be free, or none of it. Either they will have controll, or they won't. There is no middle ground.
...that once I pay my tax, levy, VAT, pre-emptive fine, or whatever it's called, I'm now legal to pirate anything I want? Sounds like a good deal to me. Will I get immunity from prosecution as well?
you americans are so pathetic while we here in Germany|Sweden|France|Belguim|Whatever we anjoy very many freedoms and the DMCA* has no powerful and everything is wonderful and blah blah blah.. [sic]
Mwahahahaha.
Now back to our regular schedule.
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* 'DMCA' used as a placeholder. Replace with favorite law, tax, levy, weird burden or policy that exists because of commercial pressures from Big Media
I think I'm missing something here.
According to the article, "this is the non-binding outcome of a one-year mediation effort by the patent office between VG Wort, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Germany's largest computer manufacturer and other makers."
Where does VG Wort, an association of German musicians, composers, etc, get the right to even suggest this? This isn't coming from drunken politicans, this isn't coming from overactive legislation, this is coming from a private agency. What's stopping these computer companies from just thumbing their nose at VG Wort?
I really do think we need a tariff on clothes though. Without clothes, I would be to embarassed to go to the store and buy music. And when I buy music, I inevitably pirate it on my favourite P2P service. So truly, clothes are the "enabler" in this vast ring of music piracy.
It all goes downhill from first post
oops.. my bad.
I even bought a subscription to see the article early so I could read it over fully just so I wouldn't make stupid mistakes like that.
and I still missed it. as stated before... oops..
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
Hmmmm.... isn't something like a 16% VAT pretty much standard in Europe anyway? Surely it's the $13 that is the extra charge.
Guess that means we can pirate as much music as we want with that many levies!
Really, I support this 100%. Because I've published on the internet (and the reading fee for this message is worth $5000 per read) I want my money.
So.... how do I get my money?
The aforementioned Canadian collective has yet to distribute to its members even one tax dollar of the tens of millions it inexplicably hoards.
I fuond this to be extremely interesting. Does anyone out there have more details on this? How can this "Canadian Private Copying Collective" get away with collecting millions of tax dollars and then not distribute it as was obviously intended? Sounds like a great scam to get in on! Imagine, the entire federal apparatus that exists to enforce the collections of millions of dollars for you to roll around in at your leisure!
Much of htat money is probably funnelled back to favored politicians to keep the legislation and tax dollars rolling in.
What a system! I wouldn't be suprised at all if the same were true of the organizations that get the taxes colelcted on dat, audiotape and CD-audio disks.
This is an ex-parrot!
$13 Bucks and legal napster. Fair deal.
There are no viable statistics about the frequency of copyright infringement, nor about which titles are copied more than others. (although searching on Bearshare and seeing how many servers it comes up with is a halfway decent estimate of RELATIVE popularity) Therefore, this would be nothing but a random and haphazard charity for an industry that doesn't need or deserve it.
It would be penalizing EVERYONE on the basis of the industry's absurd projections about how much piracy is costing them. They simply add up the retail price of every unauthorized copy, and call that their "losses" when the obvious fact of the matter is that people download 10-100 times more than they would actually have paid for hard copies of if they hadn't been able to download anything unauthorized. Plus, mp3 downloads have the mixed benefit of providing record albums with free marketing. They actually PAY radio stations to play the songs (not the other way around) as a form of marketing, so how is this so bad? If people really like the album they will buy the whole thing instead of going to the trouble of collecting the low-quality songs individually on Kazaa or Bearshare. Therefore, in effect, the industry's projected losses figures are inflated from their real world losses by a factor of at least 20.
The fact of the matter is that the reason the industry is only posting meager profits is because their expenses are unnecessarily through the roof. More than 75% of all of their revenue is spent on marketing, lobbying, PR, and other such bullshit that contributes nothing towards actually putting out a good product for a good price. Maybe the RIAA should try the latter for the change.
Repeal the DMCA!
So, now the media companies are shooting for extra cash added onto PC sales. Granted, this is just in Germany, but let's just assume for a second that it happens here in the US, too.
So, the extra cash spent on the computer goes to the media companies, right? Right. Does this pay for the right to use our computers as media centers? Or, on top of this extra fee, will they still continue to charge excessive sums for their media?
If we're shelling out an extra $13 + 16% (or about $173 on your average $1000 PC), I think that should about cover any media useage on our PCs. Somehow, though, I doubt that it'll stop the media corporations from bitching about losing money.
They need to face the music: They're charging too much for what amounts to 90% crap (Backstreet, *NSuck, Brittany, etc), and people are starting to realize it. Now people have discovered that there are cheaper ways to get the exact music they want, thus not spending cash on the crap the companies want you to buy. So the media companies need a scapegoat to cover their losses. News Flash: Companies lose money every day. They deal with it and adjust. It's called an economy. You can't be a bull all the time. Sure, it'd be great, but that's the nature of the beast. Quit making us pay (over and over again) for what we already own...
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
We've had one for a year or two now on cd-r media (and audio cassettes, I think). They just wanna expand the hell out of it to include ANYTHING that can hold an mp3. From what I understand, the levy will be based on a $/gb scale. As such, mp3 players with 20gb drives will have a LARGE fine attached to them.
In all likelyhood, every cent of this levy-tax-thing has gone into the pockets of the collective.
If you smoke after sex, you're doing it too fast.
Things like this make me glad to be an American. Europeans can bitch about us all they want, but even OUR government has not gone this far yet. Take your socialist stupidity and shove it, I'm staying in a nation where I can host Nazi web sites, buy blank CDs for a quarter, and get a dirt-cheap computer without extra taxes.
U.S.A. 0\\/nZ j00 4||!
Over the past year or so, we (meaning my academic group) has purchased around 20 000 UKpounds (around $26 000 dollars) of computing equiptment.
A 16% tax would mean 16% less computing power available. It would mean that 16% less work could get done. It would mean 16% of each grant gets wasted (from the POV of the group funding the reasearch).
Thank goodness the UK's fighting this one.
Also, they'd have to define computer. However they do it, I'm quite sure that there's at least one of the boxes I use would fall outside the definition. If it's x86 / PPC only, then looks like everyone will be buying Sun Blade 100's. If it's per CPU, then do we get taxed 4 times for our Alpha? What about if we install one of the cute PC-on-a-PCI card in one of the Suns? Is that a new computer, or not? It's an ASMP box, two CPU (USparcIIe and Celeron), two OS, one hard disc machine.
And just consider what it would do for a $1 million supercomputer. Or for a 32 node beowulf.
How can they one-up on us in passing laws more ridiculous than OURS? We pioneer making laws supressing free-speech and protecting the best of the interests of richies and we won't let this lag behind of other countries, EVER! I'm going to talk to my senator about this.
because it doesn't exist?
Who is John Galt?
Phredd
Phredd - "I have found people tend to take you far less seriously once you start waving your genitals at them..."
This kind of levy has been on any kind of recordable media for as long as I can think back (it's called The GEMA-Gebuehr). The sales price of all audio tapes, DAT tapes, CD-Rs, CD-RWs, etc. etc. includes this added price which is distributed among the recording industry. Note that the artists are actually not seeing a penny of this money.
So, by levying recordable CDs, they should actually already have their fee to level out the damage done by copying. Now they're proposing to add a second one to computers, cause they can't get their pockets full enough.
Some people have actually researched and found out that the decline in sales they're reporting is pretty much in harmony with the decline in new releases of music recordings. Surprised? I'm not.
A side note:
"Blank magnetic media, especially recordable CDs..."
That's a new one. The magnetic CD...
who needs a sig anyway?
prices of computer components are already insanely high here in germany, for example the sharp zaurus sl5500 costs EUR 599 here (yeah, the old 5500, not the 5600). put another 16% and EUR 13 on it, and it'll cost 707 EUR! cool... for that money it would be cheaper to fly to the states and get it from there.
Hostes alienigieni me abduxerunt. Qui annus est?
We are finally replacing the government as the one's who tax individuals to corporations. Remember this is progress!
This is somewhat off-topic, but I go to the college at which Peter Suber teaches. I have yet to take a course from him, but I have read many of his writings. His website has interesting stuff not only on copyright law but also on computer science and philosophy.
So does this tax apply to high-end business hardware too?
I'd hate to have to pay an extra $3.2 million for my brand new $20 million supercomputer because someone thought I was going to pirate music instead of model the weather.
These taxes really are silly. With Canada charging small-time independent musicians a hefty tax for CD media they use to distribute their own works to pay other artists to the US's piracy tax on DATs which are used almost exclusively by the IT world.
What is next? A per-kbps tax on internet connections because the media industries don't want to sue their own customers?
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
With all the taxes and assorted fees being placed on CD-Rs and presumably DVD-R's, what are we supposed to use for legitimate backup purposes? Will it get to a point where normal people can't afford DVD-R's because the MPAA is afraid they will copy commercial DVD's? CD-R's and DVD-R's are the largest writeable media format for backup right now, but soon we won't be able to use them because of outrageous taxes. I was excited to hear that DVD writers would be available commercially but at this rate, normal folks won't be able to afford media due to taxes.
I have one more observation. Why don't they tax CD players, which are obviously necessary to listen to the pirated CDs. Computers have so many uses, yet CD players have only one. And what if I buy a Computer with NO CD-Rom drive? What then? How do I then pirate music?
So many questions, so little karma.
There were toll roads...and gates and gatekeepers that charged a fee to cross, lest you incur the wrath of the King. This kind of 'spot tax' led to many things, including graft, corruption and turf wars. Eventually, Kings were replaced by nation states and these scenarios of pay-to-pass were seen to be necessary only to offset costs associated with maintaining roads and bridges.
Fast forward to this story, and we find a new use...income stream. And we see the resurgence of graft, corruption and turf wars. Ahh, sweet history, how I love to meet you, again and again.
You register it so you can prove you paid your tax. The implications should be clear, so let me walk you through again. The concept is that you have to pay a tax because it could be used for copyright violation. It's a tax on a press that might be misused. You don't think this will remain a one time thing, do you? Once you have people thinking that they should pay it once, they will pay again and again. Once you have people paying regularly, you have established a licensing system where your computer can be taken for "misuse" and computer freedom is dead.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I think that the VAT applies to the $13, not an additional 16% on the whole computer (which probably has VAT already).
The relevant sentence can be read either way, but only a very silly journo would put the small number ($13) ahead of the big one ($hundreds).
The standard of proof is high (or why else did law enforcement work so hard to track him down), and the punishment is severe.
For-profit "pirates" rate this kind of treatment, and heavy P2P sharers may risk it too (the 0.2% that provides 80% of all files). (In fact, someone with ties to organized crime, fraud, or tax-evasion / money laundering will have many worse things facing him in court. The actual copyright violation is a minor concern for gangsters)
In this case, there is no proof at all, but at least the punishment is so light you can't really call it a "miscarriage of justice". However, these fees simply make some high-tech products seem slightly more expensive, and don't create any disincentive to violate copyrights. In fact, they may encourage it, "But I've already paid!"
Does anyone else see an opportunity to create an intermediate category of punishment for copyright violators? Not so large that it'll ruin the offender's life, and not so small that people can ignore it entirely. And certainly not unfairly assuming that 100% of the population is guilty.
How about something of the same magnitude as a traffic violation? Exceeding the speed limit isn't a real crime, as usually nobody was really hurt, so the punishment is light. Copyright violations don't necessarily hurt the "victim" either. So lets treat these things similarly.
Suppose a police department (I'm ignoring questions about whose jurisdiction applies) assigns an officer to fire up Kazaa, and then fire off "tickets" to the first pageful of people who appear to be sharing something obviously copyrighted to someone else. Fees starting in the $30-$60 range for first offenders.
A critical point is arbitration should be similar to traffic court too: If you bother to contest it, you probably get off. Allow anyone who claims the police were mistaken to get off with a warning (but in the future they might investigate closely, if he shows up in the list again). Additionally, the police can only send one citation at a time- the can't count multiple uploads on a single day as repeat offenses.
For this to be possible, of course, an internet service provider would need to give the cops a means of matching IP addresses to people's names. The DMCA is a representative law that would allow this (or a similar law or technical mechanism could).
Now, I don't approve of the DMCA, but given that it's a law already (and more like it are on the way), I would rather it be used to send out minor fees, than throw people in jail. From the looks of things, the current DMCA is being used by corporations to threaten individuals with big crimes. A government agency threatening people with minor fees has at least an ideal of fairness (plus bureaucratic apathy).
A couple of official police citations is all it would take to get parents to rein in their teens' file-sharing habits, and that'd stop 50% of copyright infringement right there.
The Ashcroft DOJ is moving towards more and bigger prosecutions of "cybercrime" like copyright violations. As a compromise, I offer the "traffic ticket" model. It sends a strong message that copyright infringment will not be tolerated, but individuals are protected from excessive or capricious punishment.
PS. The use of "schizophrenic" in my subject is incorrect psychological terminology. Multiple-Personality Syndrome is a different condition than schizophrenia.
How does a US$13 plus an extra 16% tax on computers sound?
That sounds like a certain european country's economy is going down the tubes, and they are looking to tax their way into recovery. Any economist could tell you it's a foolish approach, and will only encourage the current decline in tech.
I really feel bad for the citizens though, but you know, if you vote these people into power, you get what you vote for. If they really cared, they'd vote the socialists out, but with a 10.5% unemployment rate, that only encourages the class envy that makes them want to tax the "richer" (anyone with $700 who wants a computer). Maybe they should re-evaluate why they support a party so willing to suck money out of their wallets.
That should help to offset the "I've already paid for it with this tax" against the "I need to survive off my work" arguments
AC comments get piped to
What a great book....
nbfn
This picture is actually more disturbing than homosexuality, although it is closely related. I mean, if you're a filth-pounder, this kind of picture is an aphrodisiac.
The point that the music industry seems to NOT understand is that they could make so much more money by selling music in electronic format. The ridiculous things they are doing to try and recoup the money that they claim to be losing to piracy is not helping them. They would be better off accepting the fact that some numbnuts out there are always going to pirate music, but honest customers will pay. The people who tend to spend a lot on music (like myself) don't want copies. They want the genuine item. DRM or no DRM, people like us are the people who buy the most stuff. The teenies who buy Britney and X-Tina can be suckered into cool "packaging" for their image. If you make an electronic format player with a display on the front that actually displays the album art (no longer locked into the square format that CDs and records have had) then the files will sell like hotcakes. Add "cool" flash animation and you're set with the disposable youth crowd. For serious music collectors, offer the music in a higher bitrate at a higher cost. Believe me, those folks will pay for it readily. But no... those dopes are trying to preserve a dying business model without investigating the possible future models. Oh well, their loss.
Un-news
HERE HERE!!! Everyone likes to bash America...yet they *ALL* line up to get our $$$ by the BILLIONS each year!!!
It is fun to bash America, yet even more fun to spend our money.
Biting the hand that feeds you. Ungrateful FUCK!
Phredd - "I have found people tend to take you far less seriously once you start waving your genitals at them..."
Treat everyone like a criminal because some people are criminals?
(after this law is enforced) suddenly 95% of all computer sales are USED computers... If only for 1 hour.
How Come every one of my posts says:
(Score:-1, Troll)
(Score:-1, Offtopic)
(Score:-1, Redundant)
(Score:-1, Flamebait)
It is because I am black?
This won't happen in the US for a few simple reason folks.
1. Any congress person who votes for this is going to have to go back to their district and say that they raised taxes on an item by 16%.
2. The tech companies such as Dell, IBM, and HP/Compaq also have lobbiests who kill things like this before they even happen. Anybody remember the SPACCCA or whatever it was?
3. Big businesses all over the US would howl at congress because of this and colleges would probably rebel in the South.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hi Phredd. :-)
That whole anonymous posting thing didn't fool me! Ya gotta get up pretty early in the morning to get one past little ole me!!!
Freedom Is Universal
Linux-Universe
What if we had a similar tax on TVs and PCs, but now you'd be allowed to legally download and/or record anything you wanted? Let's see: 98% of US households have at least one TV, so let's conservatively estimate that there are 200 million of them, and let's not even count how many PCs there are. So that would be about $3 billion per month or $36 billion a year. In 2002, the music industry sold about $13 billion of CDs while the movie industry sold about $20 billion of DVDs (and only sold $9 billion worth of theater tickets, by the way). Well, $36 is greater than $13+$20, so I'd say we have a deal!
Yet again another instance of someone pulling numbers out of their ass. Or has anyone here actually seen the research that supports these numbers?
What if other groups used the same logic? Nasa, for example - lobbying for levies to make up for funds lost due to those European Space Agency pirates launching stuff into to orbit cheaper and faster.
Perhaps there should be a 20% tax levied on all computers purchased without Windows. I suggest that this money goes straight to Microsoft, as everyone knows that anyone buying a computer without Windows is really in fact just pirating it.
Too bad for them this shit will *NEVER* fly in America. We hate taxes. Especially taxes that do nothing more than line the pockets of people who weren't savvy enough to solve their problem from the get-go.
Yeah, we may be ruled by special interests, but how many people have broadband access on their PC? How many huge companies (that lobby) are dependent on selling computers or computers selling?
If I can own a TV and a VCR without a license, it had better remain the same with computers.
... a new 16% VAT on all automobiles. The money raised by the tax will go towards all banks in the country. Since cars are often used by bank robbers when they get away, the banks demand that cars be taxed accordingly.
Yeah. Makes about as much sense as a screen door on a submarine.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Would legally deaf people have to pay this tax?
Why, since they can't pirate mp3s?
I presume if we are going to pay for it, it will now be perfectly legal to swap music and so on? After all, if I've just paid a levy on something, I intend to use it.
Tax floppy drives. Because all those people ripping DVDs onto 3500 floppies is hurting the MPAA so much...
And where goes this money? To an industry that maybe even a little percent would pay something if not filesharing exist, and prefer to do that instead of solving the real problem, be the high prices, the low revenues to artists, the few alternatives that takes account of possibilities given by technology, etc. Their economy model for that industry is not viable in this times so let put a tax to all so it can survive.
Next time they'll put another tax on computers so people that use Linux not hurt sales of Microsoft... mmm well, that kind tax exist already, and with the same beneficiary, but this will legalize it more.
Yes, officer, this is the same computer I registered 8 months ago. Sure, it's got a new motherboard, new RAM, a faster processor, new disks, new cards, case and PSU. And yes, a new monitor, keyboard and mouse. But it's still the same computer!
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
If have to pay what is essentially a penalty for piracy because the powers that be have presumed me guilty of it, then you're God damned right I'm gonna be pirating shit-- and if I wasn't before, then I'm going to START.
~Philly
If you are a citizen of Cyberia, and there is crime in Cyberia, and all the citizens have enough money to pay the tax, then why not tax everybody the same ammount to pay for police?
Now, I understand and sympathize with the "if I'm paying for piracy I should be allowed to pirate" argument. However, if they are only charging the equivalent of $13/box, that sounds more like a charge for policing. A charge for "unlimited file sharing" would have to be a lot higher.
If they made piracy legal, that would be more like:
The citizens of Cyberia all agree that art is good, so they agree to pay a tax to subsidize all the arts.
Once again, under those circumstances, the tax would be considerably higher, and achieving the desired results considerably more difficult. Much of the money would end up being spent processing applications from, say... somebody who takes a picture of himself with a bananna peal on his head and bills himself as a "performance artist" so he can get a subsidy check. If you think writing laws to avoid crap like that is easy, think again.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Lets see.. 20% tax on paper, cause maybe someone is photocopying something copyrighted, or printing out an ebook they downloaded. So add printer ink tax in there too. Eh, oh ya, scanner tax too.
Tax on CD Players too, because I could be playing a burned CD in them. Oh can't forget the sharpie tax, because we all know thats what people label them with.
We should slap on an additional tax to any store that sells CD burners, computers, and the like, since they are obviously profiting off all this piracy. Can't forget the broadband ISPs. If your a dialup ISP, then maybe we can give them a break.
And of course none of this would be possible without electricity.
And then theres all those people out there that don't actually pirate music, but may happen to be listening to pirated music in say, someone car. So besides income tax and all that, we should slap down a 2.5% music tax deducted directly out of your paycheck.
You think the record industry would properly be compensated then? Sure, but there will still be no shortage of other industries that loose money due to theft and other illegal actions. One day, when everythings perfect, we won't have to worry about actually paying for anything. The government with the help of lobbyists will simply tax us for everything, so the producers are all properly compensated.
Have you got a link that works in Mozilla I get some weird table problems with this one, still its nice to see their becoming less prejudiced towards us hippies.
We Canadians have been paying a levee on any recordable media since the year 2000. Only recently, there was a small disbursment from the Canadian Private Copying Collective, with more due soon. As well, the CPCC wants to significanly raise the levee to the point that it's almost not worth recordong your own CDs.
Interestingly, HP Canada is really opposed to the increase - see this page to learn more. They've formed a group of businesses that have a stake in selling digital media or digital recording devices called the Canadian Coalition for Fair Digital Access - lots of good info on thier site. Pay attention to the links page - it has the latest news on what's up with the CPCC.
A levee like this will produce simmilar results in Germany - the PC makers will end up at war with the media companies. It's already starting in Canada, as you can see...
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Hmmmm... just wanted to check.
This law is being moved forward to punish all of their PC using citizens that may or may not be breaking a law.
Conclusion #1: They are enforcing and placing punitive actions on law abiding citizens.
Yet Germany cannot seem to understand that an A-bomb going off in a city is double plus ungood, and the laws they made to stop him go unenforced.
Conclusion #2: They are not enforcing and placing punitive actions on a known international lawbreaker, the rules of which they helped make.
Thank goodness I am not in Germany. I don't think that I could put up with the punishment of innocent citizens, and then their free attitude about known nutjobs and their planet busting weapons.
In most of Europe you have to pay tax for being allowed to watch the commercials on the public television and for listening to taxes on public radios. Just owning a TV or radio makes you have to pay the stupid tax.
Every time I read about things like this I'm more and more happy that I moved to the US.
- Watching movies.
- Listening to music.
There are NO other uses for computers. As such, a new branch of International Law should be started immediately to mandate processor utilization meters, similar to electric meters and/or gas meters, for the sole purpose of taxing computer usage in order to compensate multinational corporate content providers (including companies that market media but explicitely excluding so-called artists, who actually create the work) for the fact that ALL copies of content worldwide are pirated and NONE are paid for. The law should further designate three multinational corporations as the recipients of these funds, and all artists and/or other types of content producers will be mandated to sign their copyrights over to these three entities for no compensation whatsoever.Initially, the aforementioned tax would be set at $0.0199 USD (similarly to gas stations that charge 2.09+9/10 per gallon of gasoline) per utilized processor cycle, including cycles during which the computer invokes the busy form of waiting, as in an empty loop or during polling for an event.
Processor idling technologies (such as SpeedStep and/or other energy-saving and/or temperature-reducing technologies, which cause the processor to "sleep" or reduce its clock speed during idle cycles) would be outlawed to maximize profits for the three multinational corporations. Ten percent of the funds would be wire-transferred to terrorists, who shall be mandated by the aforementioned International Law to purchase weapons of mass destruction (as the U.N. is running out of work and might otherwise lay off some of its staff).
This will have the following advantages:
- Taxes will be lowered.
- Individuals will have more discretionary spending money.
- This will keep the economy strong. (To borrow from California Governor Gray Davis' speech about how he screwed over everyone in the state with regards to their electric bill and then had the nerve to invoke doublespeak when telling everyone how he's keeping the economy strong.)
- It will save the poor, starving artists who slave over an album for a year only to see it all over the Internet the next day. (Disregarding the fact, of course, that they are required to sign over their copyrights and therefore end up earning less than a garbage truck driver even if the album is a best-selling hit.)
And last, but certainly not least, the United States Constitution will begin, "We the Multinational Corporations of the United States of America hereby declare that we have the God-given right to eternal, perpetually increasing profits. To achieve these ends..."The advent of digital reproduction and transmission technologies threatens the content industries with extinction in the long run, because they will be unable to maintain monopoly control of the particular content they sell. Once the first copy of something has been sold, it is effectively in the public domain and that's that, regardless of what the law says (because the public have basically demonstrated over and over again that they don't much care for IP protection laws and just don't obey them).
To restate this in more forward-looking terms: the public want a change in the law, and in a democracy a public that stubbornly resists re-education propaganda must eventually get its own way (even if it takes a long time).
But to repeal IP copy restriction laws would be inimical to the profitability, and therefore potentially to the bare existence, of the content industries.
In response those industries want to be partly state funded in order to support their continued existence. It's not possible to ask for this to come out of general taxation for several reasons including a worldwide political trend towards free market economics, and existing international agreements concerning fair trade.
But a tax on the computer hardware used to rip off their IP is more easily defended. It's really analogous in principle to the UK's TV and radio licencing schemes where a fee is payable by anybody in Britain who owns a radio or TV set, and which is used to fund public sector broadcasting. It's also reminiscent (in a reverse sense) of the "polluter pays" principle being used in some countries to fund environmental cleanup by charging the most tax to industries who make the most mess.
It's often said that the situation to be faced by the content industries in the near future is similar in some superficial respects to that faced by the buggy whip manufacturing industry which began to disappear early last century when people abandoned horse-drawn buggies for motor cars.
But it does differ in one very important respect which proponents of IP derestriction don't always appreciate: the world didn't really miss the buggy whip manufacturers because we all had cars. But we might miss a vanished content industry when we find that there is no more big-budget content being produced because it has become no longer possible to make big money doing so.
Whether you are prepared to buy that argument of course depends on where the best trade-off lies between freedom to copy on the one hand and a continuing supply of new hollywood blockbuster movies and/or expensively produced music recordings with which to feed this copying, on the other.
This argument says that if we can all get by on a diet of low budget college project/art house movies and raw, cheaply produced music that doesn't need much studio time production, then we can look forward to a future of free copying and no need for these industries to be supported by state-donated or -enforced subsidy. But, it concludes, there will be no more Schwarzenegger movies or Michael Jackson albums.
I personally think that argument is flawed and that there will still be big-budget content, however it will be funded differently - by embedded advertising and merchandising rather than retail sales. Unfortunately that means this type of mass-market content is doomed to become a caricature of what is now; overhyped, market saturated, blandly tailored for the average palate and merchandised to the point of nausea.
For those this doesn't suit, we will of course still have our new grassroots culture, word-of-mouth marketed and freely copyable. Quality for the discerning connoiseur! Now... where's my pirated collection of local amateur drama group DVDs? And my bootlegged CD of water-filled soda bottle music recorded live in his kitchen by Fred from next door? Oh there they
Um... where have you BEEN, man?
q:]
MadCow. (sorry... hate to nit-pick, but it's been a slow night!)
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
"yet CD players have only one."
Wrong, CD players (in computers) are often used to load programs and data. I buy hundreds of CD blanks (and now DVD) to archive and distribute code and data. Why should I pay a copywrite tax on that?
Nate
If i pay a special tax that goes to the recording industry, that should mean i can download what ever i want afterwards.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
A possible reason Germany is at the forefront of EU countries in these sorts of laws is that the gigantic Bertelsmann AG can is effectively part of that consortium.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I'm not saying it's legal, but it's not theft. Don't use the RIAA's vocabulary and doublespeak. Copyright infringement is not "theft" and those who commit it are not "thieves."
Well, if you bought a computer with no CD drive, you could always download pirated movies, music, books and software. That doesn't require a CD drive and would indeed cost the big corporations money (assuming that if you had been unable to download them, you would have purchased them).
So, yeah, your logic is kind of flawed there.
--
RumorsDaily
I submitted this 4-6 weeks ago to no avail........
:(
That is a little frustrating
Good grief!
Don't forget that the recording industry is *already* getting a levie from CDR/RW drive sold in Germany.
Check out this story published by the BBC back in 2001.
What next I wonder?
A special tax on speakers because they "might" be used to listen to pirated music?
A special tax on guitars because 9 out of 10 amateur musicians play copyrighted tunes without paying the relevant performance fee?
It's just a shame that the recording industry has such deep pockets and politicians the world-over are so willing to accept bribes.
Well, it's six o'clock in the morning here in germany, so forgive me if there are any inaccuracies, but I gues I'm the only one still awake here, so I'll try to explain what this is about. (And note that I didn't read the article, my bed is waiting for me.) ...
This has nothing to with piracy. It's a way to compensate artists for private copying. (Which isn't piracy.) Well "Privatkopie" is a supeerset of fair use. You can make copies of your CDs for your car, stereo, whatever, but you have also the right to make copies of your CDs and give them to your friends. (I think it was up to 9 friends.)
You have the right to record radio shows, and copy them for your friends. You can mix your own CDs, and give them to your friends. Well can't think of any more examples.
This taxes are collected for blank media and devices to copy. So scanner, printer, cd-recorder
Because effectively, it's fining a class of people because some of them might commit a certain crime.
1.7 pirated CDs for each real music CD? ...I get more pissed off each time that they assume that each spindle of CDs I buy goes to music. NOT ONCE of the last 200 CDs I've burned have been made into music CDs. But do they know? Yes. Do they care? No, it gives them leverage to just bundle it all in a giant pirated-cd-bin and sound more compelling.
Yeah, but if you can afford to own such nice things, you're rich, so it doesn't hurt you. Think of all the underprivileged people who can't. Fun being rich huh?
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
This stinks like the tobacco lawsuit that was supposed to fund treating sick people in America who became sick from smoking, but instead, I keep hearing that it's going to make up for budget shortfalls. In other words, it's going to fund, oh, whatever.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
My question is, what have the Germans produced that even worth stealing? If anything, the Germans should be charging a Tax on French products. Call it the stupidity tax.
Well I think that for the hypocracy to be avoided, guns and bullets should be levyed due to the fact that they kill ppl. Especially in the US were ppl buy guns primarily for shooting each other
Note: They'll support Saddam Husein because they can do business with him. If they owe so much to Saddam, how much more do they owe to Bertelsman for handling crucial war-time propaganda? Ah, the Germans get their revenge on the Americans now, teach them a lesson about trying to remove a dictator, especially one who can be good for business. And isn't it so much better to not let the market decide which artists get supported, but instead to leave that to the government committee which will distribute the funds taken from the computer buyers? Yes, computers - so useful when IBM provided them to count the Jews. But now even the Turkish guest workers can afford them. Better to raise the price.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
And if you then start pirating, it'll just make it worse.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
You say one true thing (busineses are built around maximizing profit) and use this to sneak in a bald-faced lie (stealing doesn't affect prices).
If stealing didn't affect prices, this law wouldn't even be being discussed anywhere.
When you steal something that cost 2$ to make, even if you think, "I'm only stealing 2$" you're actually stealing the 40$ some guy would've paid to enjoy that game. To think this doesn't affect prices is lunacy.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
That is 15 Euro + 16% VAT, means if you purchase a system for 1000 (excl. VAT) it is now 1015 Euro (excl. VAT). It does *not* mean an extra 16% tax on computers. VAT is 16% in Germany on all goods. Also keep in mind that all displayed prices in Germany must be shown inkl. VAT so in fact PC parts can be even cheaper than in the US.
"The Canadian Private Copying Collective, the music industry trade group, has proposed new levies to be applied to any device that can store music, such as removable hard drives, recordable DVDs, Compact Flash memory cards and MP3 players." So, you tax the music playing devices so less people have them, and thus less people buy your music. Because if less people buy music, then it's harder to pirate.
And they wonder why music sales are dropping.
what sig?
With the added Linux kit, a user could very well make copies to the hard drive, even DVD movies.
Could Sony's battle to classify their video game systems as computers backfire against them in Germany now?
It changes your profit graphs as follows. In any situation where you creat IP, you have a larger fixed startup cost. This is usually a one-time fee (you negotiate X$ for the right to 100,000 copies of a book). Added on to that is the flexible costs of producing and shipping, which are subject to economies of scale.
Unlike most physical goods, the fixed startup cost is enough that it is very hard to get into it. Most companies are in debt to some extent to fund their next project (unless they make it really big, and can keep producing new IP at a rate faster than their old funds are used, such as iD software).
Peter Molyneaux wants gov't support, because Black and White took too long and wasn't bought by enough people. EA may be able to take the write off, since they produce games each year that have profit margins to cover it (NBA Live 200X, etc), but Peter's credibility is ruined, and he can't make more games.
Just because something is cheap to reproduce, doesn't mean it's cost free. Go run a business for a few years in real life, then talk to me about how exactly it's different. Things cost money.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
"If thefts decrease, they just keep the price the same, and pocket the additional profits. "
When you decrease theft, you reduce a non-fixed cost. When that happens, the point where the part of the graph that shows your profit being maximized also moves. This means that if theft stopped, and they still charged inflated prices, they'd make less money than if they lowered their prices.
Honestly, go take an introductory economics class before you spew on Slashdot. You just look like an idiot.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Because that's not a CD player. That's a CD-ROM drive.
A CD player is a consumer device that plays music from CDs. Newer, cooler ones also play CD-Rs burned with WMA or MP3 files. The only use of a CD player is to play music.
...if the content providers agree to legislate themselves into a position where they can never, ever take any sort of legal action against anyone who shares any number of copies of their wares for free. Meaning, in more plain English, that if I want to put the sum total of the RIAA member's output on a website, they'd have to say nothing and like it. (Yes, I know this is in Germany, but I'll betcha that we'll be seeing something like this in the United States one of these days)
Of course, that won't happen. Money-grubbing bastards.
Granted, there is the danger that this won't be repealed if the piracy levels go down, but that's the job of the politicians to sort out.
That this has to be talked about in the first place reflects poorly on the morality of some people. "If they can't see that I'm stealing, is it still a crime?"
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
If the government didn't aid businesses sometimes, it could destabilize parts of the economy that they need to stay competitive in the world market.
This is like saying that you don't need welfare, because everyone should never have hard times. Since this is something that's so hard to enforce, the government's just following the path of least resistance.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
So now the government is going to force me to subsidize an industry I despise?? This is like robin hood in reverse, the rich multinationals are robbing from everyone who buys a multifunction PC in order to prop up a failing business model with limited social benifits (unlike airlines who infrastructure benifit is obvious). Without this I can easily boycott the music industry simply by failing to buy their products, or by buying similar products from an alternative source (like say buying albums from mp3.com) but with a statute like this in place I support them every time I buy something for my pc, or heck my company is forced to support them when they buy a bunch of servers. What if I was an independant music company trying to start an online presence, why should a large % tax on my equipment go to help my competitors???
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
No, it's an extra flat fee. The 16% is the standard VAT in Germany on most commodity purchases. The German VAT is similar to the combination of any local, state, and federal tax you may pay for a purchase in the US.
Or to quote Inigo Montoya, "You use that word a lot. I do not think it means what you think it means."
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Someone else made this point a few weeks ago on slashdot that I paraphrase here:
The early 1800's southern plantation and the current media economy have a lot of parallels. In both cases, change (the industrial revolution and the computer revolution) greatly changed the economic landscape by efficiency growths of orders of magnitude. Both are entrenched styles of business that are or did fight a war to maintain the status quo. In both cases, the issues extended far beyond the actual issue, to entire industries and ways of life.
This sort of revolution and change has a history that goes back much farther. For instance, the Gutenberg press made it orders of magnitude cheaper to disseminate knowledge. It destroyed entire ways of life and caused many wars.
In the case of slavery, slavery was an important part of the economy. Getting rid of it would be wrong, because all those plantation owners put a lot of work into the slaves. Also, the economy would tank without slave labor. And, if you abolished slavery, who would grow cotton? Why, the whole south would just disintigrate. All of the out of work slaves and plantation owners would all just move to the country and take up fishing.
So, you see, abolishing slavery doesn't affect just the slave owners, it affects everyone in the south. It also affects anyone who buys agricultural products.
And, like slavery or post-gutenberg europe, there are two choices: draconian control legistlation, which both did try, or to accept that the clock of history cannot be stopped and change must come. It took a war that time, and its taking a war now.
When things change by orders of magnitude, civilization *must* accept a readjustment. It happened with the Gutenberg press, it happened with the industrial revolution, and its happening now with modern communication mechanism.
Ultimately, the copyright debate is for control of the communications mechanism, just as the slavery debate was for control of slaves, and as the gutenberg debate was for control of the minds of the populace.
Talking about German taxes:
Everything that is sold in a store already includes a 16 % added value tax (Mehrwertsteuer).
Only the 13 $ fee is new, and something pretty similar is already collected on VHS recorders or tape recorders to compensate copyright holder for private copying, or copying by schools, etc.
It's not much of a news item, and it is not very well written!
That way your EUR 700.- pre-tax computer becomes a EUR 713.- pre-tax computer.
Now you add the VAT (16% in Germany?) and you've got the retail price, EUR. 827.08.
Soon the Germans will enjoy what we in Canada like to to refer to as "Nazi justice," or, as our American neighbors call it, a royal fucking up the arse.
Sounds fine to me, really, although anybody who would "steal" German music is likely desperate enough to steal the hardware itself too. Has anything changed since the second world war over there?
Great improvement.
If I am not totally mistaken, the VAT is on the $13. For the rest of the computer, VAT is paid anyways. So basically, this news is non-news. $13 is money, and anyone would prefer not to pay it but for a decent machine $13 is less than increasing the VAT by 1%.
So what they're telling us is, "You've already paid, so go ahead and download our music." Imagine how many people will start pirating music simply out of anger.
From the artical: "Blank magnetic media, especially recordable CDs, are -- or have been -- taxed in more than 40 countries, including Canada and the United States." In other news millions of Germans are buying keyboards without the ball, instead buying the nifty ones with the red light on the bottom.
the legal route is always slow and as commerce multiplies internationally, control is going to be harder to exert.
i live in the united states, a country at 'war' it's been said by our unelected president and his cabinet of out-of-touch white men.
there is a war, but it's not about oil (well, it is, but not really), liberation (well, it is), or isreal.
out on the limb, every time technology advances, society changes. looking at the wheel, agricultural, the automobile, and the airplane, each of these inventions has revolutionized our existence and ability to grow and adapt.
communication is no different. in 70 years, we have gone from the telegraph and rudimentary telephones to a global interconnected network reaching anyone who can afford to connect. i can check three emails accounts from a mountain in malibu. are my servers working? what's the latest news? what is going on in france right now? text message to my friend in paris. he's going to a club. i should go to a club tonight. and the path diverges instantaneously.
my thoughts here are the companies are not trying anything new. exploitation and the economic battles waged over "freedom" on the backs of life and choice are not at all new. mr bush and mr blair are not the first to invade another country, france and germany aren't the first to claim peace out of economic goals (look at a map of the countries supporting the war and against it and then look at a map of the euro and the dollar and evaluate all this in the light of iraq moving it's oil currency to the dollar).
the difference is now the curtain is gone and someone with a handycam anywhere can broadcast the truth. there are a lot of false truths projected, but if you look through the snow, you can see the trees.
legality is the last dying breathe of any oligarch. when your consumers become hostile providers of your income and you make laws to force them into certain channels you deem safe, you have already lost. the best products go unadvertised and the best laws go unwritten; everyone just knows and respects them. is murder wrong? yes. is stealing wrong yes? is copyright theft wrong? yes. are abusive copyrights wrong? yes. are abusive copyrights prohibiting future innovation wrong? yes. are all abusive copyrights prohibiting future innovation under the umbrella of copyrights? no. So we can see the system being abused for the gain of those who are fighting not to adapt. sorry my friends, mother nature knows best and evolution's worked for a looong time, I don't think your money and governments and laws and police and the rest of your noise will change that.
sure, they might levy a tax; people might go to jail; innovation might be stifled, but we live in a new time and the rules are changing every day and eventually the rulers will too. Maybe in a year, maybe in five, maybe in a hundred, but the clock is ticking. I would urge all these old white men fighting over financial cocksurity to get out and enjoy the sunlight; there's not future in oppression. the jig is up.
oh and china? this is a message to you. you can only keep your people in the dark so long. if all these field workers saw the luxuries we have over here, like toilets and clean water, they might not think we were wrong, but might think their leaders are the problem. and cisco can't build any firewall to keep you safe from a billion people who want the blinders taken off.
- A VAT (yes, that's the 16%) is applied to all consumer goods in Germany, with a few exceptions like food for which a lower rate of 8% is applied. And yes, it's deductable. A company or a freelancer will get tax returns on the VAT paid.
- The 13$ going to the media outlets (don't know the Euro amount) was expected for some years know. Similar fees have to be paid to recording devices and media, like tapes, since really long time ago.
This fee is officially meant as a compensation for private copies you are allowed to make, see it as a fair use compensation. And that's were we get to the really interesting point: If the media corps already get compensated for fair use, how can it be legal to implement copy protection schemes in the first place?The only thing that happened was that PCs were recognized as devices capable to make copies of music records.
...who is Gail Wynand
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
At least you got now an incentive to copy/backup more of your friends CDs/DVDs/VCDs/whatever...
Where are the consumer-right organisations? Isn't time we organize ourselves (better) to defend our rights against these lobbying corporations? As an individual, you're basically completely powerless against the sheer amount of money of these big companies and the politicians they have on their wagelist...
It's easy to dismiss this when you are located in another country, but you have to remember that Germany like some other parts of the continent have some history of dealing with copyright in this way. For instance, a surcharge ("tax") is levied on all blank tapes and various other related media, and the surchage is paid to a copyright collecting society which then distributes it to the authors/etc.
The reasoning behind this was that for a majority of cases (not "all" cases), the blank media would be used to make recordings of copyright works (if you dispute this, I'd like you to think about how you use blank media, and whether most of it has copyright works, albeit for personal consumption). This is not a perfect model, but of all the various possible models, it isn't so bad. Remember also, before you bring "big corporate music world" into it, that these copyright societies represent many individual authors/etc and have a history of dealing with micropayments and handing out royalties to those individuals - which despite some imperfections is not a terribly bad model for ensuring that rightholders are paid for their works.
So while this seems not very workable, it's not surprising to see where it is coming from: some politics of old media copyright societies trying to get a grab into the digital world.
A few misconceptions have surfaced here that I would like to comment on.
m a01.html - sorry, I don't know how to embed the link, but it's German anyway)
... etc....
First, the proposed levy is a flat 13$ which would be levied at the point of sale, ie. it would just be included in the advertised price of the computer. (All products sold in Germany include a (federal) 16% Value Added Tax (less for food, books, and a few other things) - even if sold over the internet, btw, so no implicit subsidy of internet B2C commerce).
As has been pointed out before, there is an organisation (GEMA, "Gesellschaft für musikalische Aufführungs- und mechanische Vervielfältigungsrechte" - yes, we do use long words) that - with authorisation from the state - collects a levy on empty media, such as MC, VC, CDR, etc, as well as concerts, radio broadcasts, etc, as well as other equipments, such as tape recorders and VCRs, and last but not least (dig this) on answering machines and copy paper (so there! no inconsistency here...) (Source: http://www.kassablanca.de/zo/inside/gema/150501ge
The collected money is distributed to the authors (ie composers, song writers, editors), mostly for billboard chart music and classical music - not to the musicians, though (unless they are the authors, obviously)!
(BTW, there are other similar organisations responsible for other content, eg. the GWFF for foreign movies, and the GÜFA for porn (http://www.guefa.de/)
They levy fees for porn shown at trade fairs, in hotel rooms, etc... Back to music, though:)
Now, this is some bureaucracy, granted, and it is debated about, but mostly accepted. Why? Well, paradoxically, this generic presumption of guilt is concomitant with much _less_ control and restriction of the individual consumer!
Fair use:
By German Urheberrecht, you explicitly have a fairly generous right of fair use: you may make a few (about 7) copies (from a legitimate source, eg a CD you bought) for private use (including use by family and good friends). Others may make the copy for you (eg if they have the equipment) if they don't charge you.
This covers any format you choose, CD, MP3, cassette, whatever.
While offering content via P2P is probably illegal (since it is not restricted to family/friends), downloading via P2P is debated, but arguably legal (since it is for private use) - the industry hasn't dared attacking private P2P users in Germany yet, AFAIK.
Anyway, there is certainly no such outrageous piece of legislation as the DMCA.
Where
- was Professor Edward Felton intimidated into not publishing academic research on watermarks?
- was Dmitry Sklyarov from Elcomsoft (a foreigner, even!) charged for writing software for reading Adobe's Ebook?
- has a website (2600) been forced to remove information about and links to DECSS?
- are ISPs being forced to hand out data about customers if the music industry demands so?
Not in Germany. So, if I have to pay an extra 13$ for my 2000$ Powerbook, and an extra 0.12$ for my CD-Rs, but can pretty much do what I want with my (and my friends') music and video, as long as I don't make a business out of it - seems sensible to me, I'll take it.
Germany has sensible crypto laws and a government some what clueful on OSS and monopolistic abuses. They also have some interesting microkernel reserch going on over there. I was just starting to think it would be a good place to go to grad school. If this passes I'm back to the old drawing board.
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
Hmm, I guess they have a new tactic. Cant get you for copyright violations, then they will get you for tax evasion.
:-) (just ask Mrs Graf or Mr Becker)
Btw, if you dont pay taxes in Germany and you get cought, you will get a bigger penalty then if you would have killed somebody
thank you holger.
So what did *you* contribute to European freedom? My guess is, *maybe* your grandfather fought on the beach of Normandy, but you didn't.
You may reflect yourself in his glory, but in reality you are just a pale shadow of the man he was...
Unless it was imported illegally.
Yes, actually doing illegal things allows you to avoid laws.
Seems like a very novel concept to me. Maybe i should go patent that, for great PROFIT!!
Free as in mason.
BTW, the VG Wort (and the VG Bild-Kunst (image-art)) claim that this strengthens the right to make a private copy. The hardware-makers protesting this (like HP) would rather use DRM and TCPA. (Article in German
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
I mean, such a news would make the ire and anger of the industry I work in. So why this only source is cited and nobody else heard of it here in germany ? I am not even speaking of major media network, but of people in the know and in the industry. So , is thias UIP "source" reputable ?
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
For 16%, you might see shops selling computers without the CPU and also selling CPUs, and you would definitely see shops selling monitors and printers separately. But if the tax difference is only $13, it's not worth the trouble to avoid it, so computer shops will just give you a free copy of Napster so you can download the music you were forced to pay for.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
DDS4 (DAT) tapes hold 20GB each. Unfortunately not as cheap as CDR, and already heavily taxed by the RIAA....
SURELY you don't believe people are buying Brittney Spears albums for the SINGING, do you? Obviously the "music" is a front to hide a pirate software distribution system! That $16 CD might have some low-quality music filling space, but it's got enough room to hide an entire $20,000 chip-design CAD system or a $500 integrated development environment or a $0 copy of EMACS on it, and some music CDs have ACTUALLY BEEN OBSERVED IN THE FIELD WITH DATA and SOFTWARE ON THEM, such as jpegs of bands and dancing animated screen savers. One such highly subversive example that EVIL RECORD COMPANIES HAVE ALREADY DEPLOYED is a track by Information Society called "300 8N1" that actually produces ASCII when played to a 300-baud modem.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Unlike most physical goods, the fixed startup cost is enough that it is very hard to get into it.
With many physical goods you have to design not only the goods themselves but also machines and systems to produce those goods. Even where you do have costs like movie sets they don't need to be durable enough for hundreds of thousands of uses.
Peter Molyneaux wants gov't support, because Black and White took too long and wasn't bought by enough people. EA may be able to take the write off, since they produce games each year that have profit margins to cover it (NBA Live 200X, etc), but Peter's credibility is ruined, and he can't make more games.
Then either he asks for more credit from his bankers, seeks alternative sources of investment or goes bankrupt. There is no god given right for a business to break even, let alone make a profit.
Yeah we should have let Germany have France. They might have bred out the French faggotness.
According to Wired, the Canadian Private Copying Collective, the music industry trade group, has proposed "new levies to be applied to any device that can store music, such as removable hard drives, recordable DVDs, Compact Flash memory cards and MP3 players."
I hereby suggest the following new taxes
-The motion picture tax (DivX)
-The application tax (ISOs)
-The games tax (ISOs)
-The ebook tax (ASCII?)
-The magazine tax (Scans)
Also, this tax does not go anywhere far enough. it does not include conventional hard drives that time and time again have been proven to be used for the above stuff. Funny, maybe that would piss off too many corporations.
Somebody should hit them with a cluebat. Particularly those producing cameras using Compact Flash should file a suit, since all their camera users must pay a tax to this organization. How's that for rediculous tax? Run a full size page ad in a canadian newspaper, with the picture of a camera and the text "To take pictures with this camera, you must pay the CPCC for music piracy". That should get some attention...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The "Tax" is cashed at the manufacturer. No registration required.
EOF
Look! It must be true! A French faggot just moderated my post!
These taxes make people feel right about downloading music. Why can't we download music music, we payed for it when we bought our computer?
;)
Since Germany is part of the EU, I think they can purchase computers all over europe without paying the extra tax (that is, is thay don't plan on downloading music with it
Who gets that money?
Why shouldn't I get it? I create stuff too. Hey maybe if you gave me that money to Joe Schmoe down the street he'd create more useful stuff too.
Practically like cake manufacturers getting a levy on ovens and recipe books.
Would they get an increase every time their profits go down?
What a crap law.
What bothers me the most is the fact that they airbrush out her pussy! As if having a pussy clearly visible is somehow inappropriate?
This isn't about copyright. This is about failing businesses who want their operations subsidised by the government. In the old days, they pleaded for tarrifs, legal monopolies and subsides. Now they want to tax computers.
Contrary to some peoples posts, increased costs in production do lead to increased prices. This is because a business will cease to make more profit for additional production quicker. It will then slow down production. This will shift the supply curve, pushing prices up.
Barto
Still, one has to be realistic. As an alternative to the DCMA and pervasive DRM, it may well be preferable. Lots of uncompetitive industries get subsidized. Subsidies and handouts to the media industries to have them shut up seem no worse than subsidies and handouts to steel or defense companies. If anything, they are less harmful.
So, it really depends on the details, as some people in the article also point out.
Note that blank CDs are already taxed in both the US and Germany (and many other countries) just for this reason.
As somebody who's living in Germany: There is a 16% VAT on everything for years and years...(the only exception are food and other things you need to survive (sorry geeks, you don't need PCs to survive...)
And that 13$ fee is discussed for eons (sp?) so nothing to see here, please move along...
1. the german government then leaves consumers alone (even if the media company pursue them through the legal system).
2. the media owners accept their internet fait and fade into the sunset if the fail to change and adapt.
better to just kill it off quick.
"Blank magnetic media, especially recordable CDs, are -- or have been -- taxed in more than 40 countries, including Canada and the United States.
"
Yes, those magnetic CDs. Careful you don't have a magnet near them or you'll wipe out all your data.
I'm supposed to be surprised about this?
They should also propose a law to tax Jews at a higher rate, because everyone knows they are going to be cheating some Good German down the line and profiting.
At least one good thing about the EU - expanding eurozone capitalism is bound to cause this to fail - don't like the tax? Buy in the Czech Republic, Poland, etc.
But it doesn't suprise me that it starts here. Damn glad to be leaving this country come Tuesday after half a year.
Guten tag. Ich will mein leben zurueck.
Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen.
My first reaction was I don't pirate copyright material so why should I have to pay.
But doesn't a charge like this give you some legal rights. They can hardly ask you to pay for something if you have already payed to pirate it?
So if they do introduce this I will travel to Germany and buy the cheapest PC I can find and bring it home and use it to pirate to my hearts content safe in the knowledge that I have already payed.
....Peter Suber, a prominent advocate of free online scholarship, analyzed the various post-levy scenarios in his FOS blog:
"What I can't tell is whether the copyright levy on hardware will come with universal permission to copy....
My Guess is that if this does become law (what colour is the sky in their world though??) , that the proceeds will be used to chase down anyone who is actually caught copying material. I would be very surprised if the paying of this tax and/or levy infers any rights to copy.
--My sig is bigger than your sig--
It's the Backdoor Boys.
Payroll taxes
Income taxes
Regulations that violate private property rights
Redistribution of weath via "welfare" and Socialist Insecurity
Having a country that's "a little bit socialist" is like being "a little bit pregnant". It can't happen. Either a country is free, where the rights of one individual is bound only by the equal rights of another, or a country is socialist.
I mean apart from the principle of the thing, who really cares about e12 extra on the price of a e700-e1000 computer? It's like having to pay for the mouse seperatly or something, I just don't care.
And before anyone says otherwise, the 16% VAT is already charged, as it is everywhere in europe (although the rate varies slightly). The "+VAT" means the e13 will be subject to VAT, making it actually something like e15.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
First of all, they already pay 16% VAT on stuff in Germany, so I don't see how this would be piracy-levy-specific. Second of all, stop whining! In Sweden we have 25% VAT :)
At first, before I read the article, it sounded pretty good actually. A $13 computer, with 16% tax? That's only, like $15 for a computer. I figured, must be a piece of crap, so I read the article and found that the tagline was misleading after all... sigh.
Instead of taxes and levies why not jail everybody a couple of days every year because they can't catch all criminals, mp3 downloaders etc??
So, let's get this straight... Copying an audio
CD to my hard disk is a crime. Just in case I'd
like to do this, I should pay a tax to greedy
corporations. But they will still defame me in
the media, possiblly hack my PC, and possibly
take me to court. At the same time they tax me,
and everyone, despite the particular use of each
PC.
These greedy blood sucking parasites can't have
it both ways.
(No, I didn't read the actual link, the headline
was enough to make me angry!)
This "boiled frog" analogy sounds like a variation on the "excluded middle" argument, in Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit. Can you (or anyone) provide a reference to a documented experiment on a frog? I found vague references to "classical physiology experiments" on Google, but nothing more concrete. If there's no current work in this area, perhaps we could persuade someone to perform this experiment and document it. Okay, okay! Stop making that face! Maybe someplace that already serves frog legs, eh?
Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.
You know, Hitler and the Nazis instituted a VAT tax on printing presses....
Finkployd
No shit, sherlock. I didn't say it was cost-free. I said the MARGINAL COST was negligible if they have efficient methods of distribution. When you're dealing with goods with a high marginal cost, the price you're going to have to charge is:
Marginal Cost + (other costs + profit)/(how many you expect to sell
And economies of scale may apply to the marginal cost, which would allow the company to make more money by selling more copies at a lower price. Software is the ULTIMATE economy of scale, since the marginal cost is negligible compared to the dollar amount of costs recovered per copy sold (even for packaged games, it's like $2 vs. $30 So if the industry could sell 4 times as many copies at 1/3 the price, they would have 1.33 times the revenue with a much smaller increase in expenses, resulting in a large increase in profits. That kind of thing would never work in an industry where the marginal cost is a significant portion of the price of the product. Economies of scale always have the potential to shift the profit sweet-spot downward, and software/music is the ultimate economy of scale.
Repeal the DMCA!
What artists are going to get what percentage of the tax (for compensation)?
Isn't EVERY original work copywritten? Including ALL web pages? Isn't EVERYONE violating copyright when they view a web page?
That means anyone who has a web page up can claim a part of the tax revenue?
Copyright is dead. It's over. Trying to enforce it is like trying to enforce a law that gravity doesn't exist.
I'm a musician. Sure my music hasn't been sold by major labels, but aren't I still entitled to some of the cash from this (as well as the Canadian and US recordable media levys)?
_______
2B1ASK1
That young lady ought to see a doctor.
As businesses go on covering their 'lost' sales they further provoke piracy since people do not find it smart to buy something they can get for free or at least ten times cheaper. I wonder if pirates are doing the exact same thing and raise prices since it is fairly hard for the Joe Average to get a pirated copy free today unless from p2p services which are mostly slow and unreliable.
Umm, let me see, is it even possible to tell the thefts (since piracy really can't be dealt as a theft) have dropped?
Lowering prices is not likely to happen because record studios are too greedy to admit the sales have dropped because and only because of too high prices.
- Voice of Ambience -
- Voice of Ambience -
While I agree with as jhunsake (81920) said: "You're a fucking moron."
I will attempt to show you _why_.
The previous poster wrote:
Here's the problem. If everyone -- and I mean *everyone* -- is violating some particular law, then that law needs to be revisited. Obviously that law isn't for the good of the people, if the people themselves are violating it.
To which you responded:
Not all laws exist for the good of the people. Some laws exist for a different good, but people must still obey them.
Well in the United states a few years ago an abominable thing called slavery existed by law in some states. That nation was ripped appart for years in an attempt to redress what we now universally discerned as an evil. Laws are made by people. People are capable of making mistakes.
I postulate that is is your responsibility to disobey laws that you find morally objectionable. You might have to do jail time as a result of that action, but if everyone agrees with you then that effort will be well spent.
So your "but people must still obey them" attempts to take from people their right to disagree with the status-quo. Anyone who tries to use logical arguments to explain the taking of that right from individuals is indeed a moron.
Does that mean you can copy all the music you want.
I was wondering that about the tax in Canada for CDR's. If they are charging the tax to pay off the recording industry, does that mean you have just paid your royalties?
If people should be paying for music to which they listen, why are radio stations paid to play music instead of charged?
Why are some of the most pirated songs also the biggest sellers at the stores?
From the article:
... If the levy does not imply permission to copy, then which copying does it cover?
Moreover, the fuzzy nature of the surcharge leaves a lot to be desired. Peter Suber, a prominent advocate of free online scholarship, analyzed the various post-levy scenarios in his FOS blog: "What I can't tell is whether the copyright levy on hardware will come with universal permission to copy. If so, that's a big gain for a small cost
"If it covers copying without prior permission, then users will simply stop asking for permission, and convert all copying to pre-paid copying. If it covers copying without pre-payment, then that begs the question: what does the levy pre-pay? (It's not clear) how the plan would continue to distinguish authorized from unauthorized copying."
This brings up an interesting question. If I pay this surcharge, have I effectively purchased the right to violate copyright laws, and download/burn/rip anything that I want? I mean, if I was a law abiding citizen and refused to illegally copy illegal music, what's to stop me from changing my mind and start to break the law, in retaliation for them assuming that I'm a criminal?
If before I was buying digital media simply to burn Linux ISOs, back up my harddrive, etc, what's to stop me from deciding to start illegally copying music, now that I have to pay anyway for activities that were previously 100% legal?
This will only encourage piracy. In fact, this will encourage people to pirate even more, in order to recoup the funds they paid in digital media taxes.
And I thought governments were stupid....
This space left intentionally blank.
Why not place a tax on tools too. That way people who have their cars stolen can be compensated by the tool manufacturers ;-)
Seems fair to me!!!
And... How about a tax on newspapers just in case they get used in a pick pocket crime.
The list goes on.
FROM:
Jesus of Nazareth did not die so we could enjoy eggs and chocolate bunnies!
TO:
Jesus died so we could enjoy eggs and chocolate bunnies! - Cadbury, Inc.
Your signature needs a little humor, especially when dealing with idoltry and blasphemy. Your signature plainly points out a rediculous custom, while mine makes it fun to make fun of people who blasphemy. It's blasphemy for the blasphemers...
Give them a taste of thier own medicine, and have fun with it...
Wise as a Serpent, Harmless as a Dove...
the canadians are mulling a tax on anything that can store music....
1) do we want to pay double the price for PAPER because music can be stored on it ? (what about preprinted paper, because you can doodle music in the margins!) (this proposal should be written on soft paper about 15cm wide... before we have to pay music tax on that too...)
2) how are they going to tax newborns, since people can obviously store music... ?
isnt this ridiculious?
I think I am going to go buy myself a new big hard drive and start pirating for all its worth after these laws pass, since I will be paying taxes to "make up for piracy", I might as well get some benefit fromt he piracy. To this point, All i do is put copies of CD's in my car's changer (with the faceplate sitting next to my stereo, there is no way anyone else can listen to those CD's in the car while I listen to them inside...) (Besides, after having the changer stolen TWICE in one year, you learn fast, esp with insurance reimbursement (they cover the changer, you eat the music cd's since they are personal property and not covered by the car policy)
yeesh.
In the UK (I don't know about the US) tobacco taxes are ridiculously high. An imported 50g is £3.50 whereas a taxed one is about £9. Perhaps a similar thing may occur with media and there will be "CD smugglers" bringing in cheap CDs from abroad.
Copyright violation is not stealing. It's copyright violation. You have not deprived anyone else of physical goods, just some profit that they might have made if you had purchased the copyrighted work rather than making a copy of it.
Please read the whole comment, and note that from what I just said, this does not make copyright violation any better than stealing, from a legal perspective. They are both violations of the law. The difference is that "piracy" is equated in people's mind with pillage, rape, robbery, and murder - equating "piracy" with copyright violation is exactly what the so-called content industry does, so that rather than consider questioning the law, you back down. Disagreeing with something called "piracy" implies that you might think that pillage, rape, and murder, and everything else that goes along with it, might be something else that you disagree is bad.
Letting the content industry twist words for the sake of propaganda isn't in our best interest. Propagating their twisting by using their terminology is probably not in our best interest either. Let's call apples apples and oranges oranges, and not compare things that have no relation to each other. "Piracy" is not a good metaphor for copyright violation.
to the PIRACY (tm) problem insofar as the media producers are concerned is as follows:
Take the total profits of the media producers for the year prior to Napster being available. Any decrease in profits in subsequent years is obviously due solely to PIRACY (tm).
Each year, the difference between the pre-Napster year profits and the profits this year is to be fully recovered by a tax on all PC (i.e., Piracy Conspiracy) equipment sold, such tax proceeds to be distributed pro-rata to the media producers (even if they produce nothing at all in the year).
Bwahahahaha!!!
Another example of how the socialists never pass up an opportunity to raise taxes.
I feel sorry for the German people and how they will have to live with another incremental lowering of their standard of living.
Anybody got any data on the effective tax rate in Germany?
So this means you can "pirate" all the free downloads you want since you already paid for them at the time you purchased your PC. Right? As an author, where do I go to get my cut? Oh, your share will probably depend on how many 100 year old titles you have in your archive.
I remember some media buzz about WORM (Write Once Read Many, if i recall correctly), but not that they were actually magnetically written. Thanks for the clarification :)
Just a little nit pick... My VXA-1 tapes can hold 33GB, and that isn't even the largest tape drive I have seen. So CD-R and DVD-R are not the largest. They are perhaps more convenient for backing up other CD's or DVD's, but are not the only solution. ;)
I'd heard the analogy before, and whether or not it is actually true or has been scientifically proven is irrelevant. It still has some merit as an analogy.
:p
Searching google (exact terms: "boil a frog" temperature slowly) turns up many, many uses of the analogy, applied to just about any topic. I must be bored today, but I looked at all of the results, and not a single one cited any scientific study or anything.
Fine. I'll start the water...
Damn. I tried one last place, and found this. Guess it's not true...
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
I can just see it now... petrol stations just outside the German border advertising cheap petrol and PC's at 16% off!
"If I copy something that I didn't create, and don't give money to the people who spent money to create it, I'm not stealing."
Sorry, I don't follow that logic. This is the Real World logic: "If a customer wants something, they will pay for it and get it. If they don't want it or can't afford it, they don't pay for it and don't get it"
You can rationalize it as saying there's "no loss" when you copy something without paying for it, but that's a lie. If you really cared about the music, you'd buy using money.
Stealing is stealing, I don't see why people here seem to think that just because the copy cost is 0, that implies permission to copy everything.
I'll leave you with another example. " If somebody walks out of a shop with something they haven't paid for, the shop has had property stolen, and they need to pay to replace it. The money has to come from somewhere, I agree. The same is not true of copyright infringement."
Ok. Say you're some kid, who buys a video game at a store. You go home and copy it. Then you go back to the store and return the game, claiming it doesn't work. You get your money back. Have you stolen something? Why, yes, you have. You've stolen a copy of the software -- a sale that would otherwise have remained a sale. Again, theft is theft. Dressing it up in a little dress doesn't make it any different.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
If you have money for something, you buy it.
If you don't have money for something, you do not buy it. You also don't steal it.
If you want a game and can't afford it, try out the demo. Go to a friend's place and try it. Etc, etc.
Don't think that you can steal it and rationalize it by saying, "someone else will now pick up the slack I have created by stealing." because you still stole, and you still cost money to everyone involved in creating and retailing the item.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
The store and other people who made the item lost the money. If you want something, you have to pay for it. That's how economics work. When you steal, you break economics. You cause the profit graphs to shift, you change the costs, etc.
Even if you don't notice money out of your pocket (which you wouldn't, Mr. Thief), the company would notice its sales are less, and have to compensate for that somehow.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Unfortunately, it's the easiest solution. So everyone who wants to use these tools legitimately suffers because of Pegleg and Redbeard who like to swap warez by the gig.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Music seems to be fairly inelastic, as does console hardware, but software itself has a decent elasticity.
:)
Not as many people 60$ want software as people who 30$ want software. I know that part of the resurgance of the Dreamcast in 2001/2002 was the incredible price slashes possible with a console going away. I was able to pick up a collection which currently numbers 41 games. If I see a console game for 30$, I certainly don't have to think as hard about buying it as I do a 60$ one
eBay's a nice model of inelasticity. Try and get Suikoden 2 for less than 140$ CDN. Rabid fanboys keep the price far, far too high for most people, and this suits collectors fine since there's a relative scarcity of the item in question.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Your analogy is flawed. Stores raise prices uniformly for theft, not just for people who are wearing hats. It would be more appropriate to liken this to a store charging $3 to every person who walks by the front door and is wearing a hat, whether or not they even go into the store.
Keep in mind that this will also tax all of those computers that Google uses for its web-crawling, and every computer that Los Alamos puts into its massive computation cluster (modulo location). Now tell us how "fair" it is.
This isn't about people buying replaceable parts of higher quality due to wear and tear, this is about people copying things they have no permission to copy. This leads to less creativity and less jobs for people who like to create.
Staff at Kinko's or other copy centres should not let people walk in and Xerox entire novels. People with home computers should not be copying software they have no permission to. While the first case has external agents ensuring that nothing bad's happening, the second case is left up to the people. Most people will not hesitate to break the law if they think it'll get them something extra.
Since law makers can't be there to stop them, they are passing the costs on in terms of higher fees for the tools used to break the law (averaged out over sales). Most people who commit crimes use guns, because of this all gun owners must register and have background checks when buying new guns. Every person who copies software uses a computer at some point, so everybody who uses a computer must pay for Pegleg and Redbeard's acts of piracy.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I'd heard the analogy before, and whether or not it is actually true or has been scientifically proven is irrelevant. It still has some merit as an analogy.
Apparently, you haven't been following the Doonesbury comic strip lately... An untrue analogy is worse than having no merit --It actually discredits the target of your analogy. In this case, if a frog really does jump out before it lets you boil it alive, then maybe the analogous case (where this German law leads to worse resrictions) is equally false. For example, if I said, "This law will further restrict freedom the same way that rocks roll up hill", then you would recognize the analogy as false and reason (perfectly justified) that my point about restricting freedom was probably unfounded or incorrect, as well.
Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.
nobody has ever been killed by a cd or dvd though, unless you're counting Jet Li movies where he throws them into the necks and back of bad guys. :-)
What if I don't care about music? If I like music, I will buy CDs, not computers. What you are suggesting is that the government tack a levy on automobiles because people use them to steal books.
The only way you can do anything useful about it is prove that the loss is negligible, and to stop illegal copying.
There is another option: fight stupid fucking legislation like this. This isn't like raising the prices of CDs to recoup losses. It's the *government* intervening on behalf of corporations to steal from the public, on the grounds that the public is stealing from the corporations.
This is a fucking crock. Fight the *crime*, and the *criminals*. Don't pass legislation that benefits groups that have been convicted of illegal practices like price fixing, at the expense of innocent citizens.
What we are seeing is not capitalism. It is corporatism, which is the antithesis of capitalism.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Actually, I don't believe that inevitability is assumed anywhere, as good slippery slope arguments only explain a possibility or probability of a chain of events occuring. In this way they are very useful, as history can demonstrate.
Take a look at the situation of the Jews in Nazi Germany. They lost their rights in small steps - they're restricted to certain areas, then forced to where identifying marks, then they're personal property is taken, then small groups of them at a time are "relocated" without being told where, though the eventual destination is concentration camps. Elie Wiesel provides an excellent description of this process in "Night", and how because of it few of the Jews were able to face the facts about what was being done with them. Now, had the Nazi's announced to the entire Jewish population that they were being rounded up and sent to death camps, a massive uprising would have occured.
As I said before, real slippery slope arguments express the possibility or probability that something will happen, and in such a fasion they are very useful.
Dumbass: "Apple's and oranges both come from trees, so they must be the same thing!"
Man with Brain: "Um, no, they both come from trees, yes, but they are completely different kinds of fruit. Just look at them, one is either red or green and the other is frikkin orange."
Dumbass: "You can rationalize it by saying they're different colors, but thats a lie. If you really cared about apples and oranges you'd know they're the same thing."
Man with Brain: "You moron! Just because two things have something in common doesn't mean they're identical! They both come from trees, start as flowers and have seeds in the middle, but thats it! They have fundamentally different charachteristics that make them totally different kinds of fruit! Why can't you understand that?!? Go pull your head out of your ass and study some logic!"
Dumbass: "You're just nickpicking. Look, I can run out to my yard and pick an apple from one tree and an orange from the other tree. I can eat both of them. Therefore, they're the same thing. Next thing you're going to tell me that cannibalism and income tax evasion aren't the same crime either. Common, one means eating a person and the other eats away at the US treasury. Therefore, tax evasion is really cannibalism!"
I only get CD-R's when they are free.... Most every weekend around here (New Orleans) one of the stores here has spindles of like 50 with mail in rebate for complete refund. So, basically, I just pay sales tax (about 9% here), and postage. Do they not have these deals around the US? I haven't bought a full price CDR is I don't know how long....sometimes they have these deals on the CDRW's too....just stock up when I see them...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Well I keep hearing "There's a tax on CDR in Canada" but just yesterday I bought 100 cdrs for 35$ (thats 0,25$US/CD) so either that shop is "smuggling cdrs" or the tax is not that bad...
We've always been at war with Eurasia.
Wrong (1) "When something is stolen from a store, the company has 2 choices: take a loss (maybe go out of business), or pass on the costs."
Unless, of course, the margins are so fat to begin with that the level of theft is irrelevant. If I sell widgets for $18.95 when they cost under $1 to produce (guess which product that might be), I can tolerate a fair amount of theft before it's time to recalculate. If I can eliminate theft and the market will support a $19.95 price (which it might, after eliminating "theft"), I can actually pocket the difference AND increase the price.
Wrong (2) "Are you contemplating insurance fraud? You are making everyone else's premiums go up when you do it."
So rates would drop if fraud were reduced? Yeah, right. That line comes from an industry that claims to run at a loss every single year (due to fraud, of course), and yet they somehow manage to attract investors and survive. If you wanted to name two products whose price has little to do with fraud or piracy, insurance and recorded music would be great choices.
Wrong (3) "The only way you can do anything useful about it is prove that the loss is negligible, and to stop illegal copying."
Very few of the P2P copies would have been purchased, so the loss is already negligible. Long ago, the software industry learned that high prices encouraged piracy. When the piracy level got high enough, they realized that lower prices meant more customers and more profit. The music/copyright industry has not observed a high enough level of piracy to reach this conclusion. They will, but not before their obsolescent business model runs out of steam.
I doubt the majority of /. readers' computers have serial numbers. (and, pu-lease, don't go on about the cpuid thing - cpus can be swapped in a metter of seconds).
"Without this levy, the terrorists would have won," declared President George W. Bush.
Shares in Microsoft, Inc., (MSFT) rose 15% in response to this legislation.
Is this thing on? Hello?
So does that mean that Germans will then be able to copy things as they see fit since they are paying a fee specifically to cover that? How does this relate to the levy we have on blank CDR disks in the US?
Since Germans with computers will already have paid the fees to the artists to use their music, file sharing will be legal and RIAA endorsed for a flat rate, something everyone seems to want.
Then, of course, I woke up and realised that the RIAA is secretly run by Catbert, and it's all an evil scheme to get you to pay for nothing, since you have to pay the tax _and_ pay for the music.
Beep beep.
in the meanwhile, I would consider it unethical, if anyone would be given a chance to, to *not* rip off an insurance broker, bank, "security" firm, or other institution.
- These companies make money off of peoples paranoia - the more fear, and uncertainty they can cram into the popular mindset, the more money they will create. This fosters an environment where lies, and dark dealings are not only successful, but encouraged... the only time my family's vehicle has ever been broken into that I can remember was a week after we turned down a call for auto insurance. Strange? The same people causing the events for insurance to be there could be selling insurance? Of course this may not apply here.
-
they rip off their customers. This is how they stay in business. This is how all companies stay in business. If you are not ripping your customers off, you are not in business. Ripping these people off is like stealing from the rich -and keeping for the poor - because they serve no real purpose other than to drain wealth from a large group of people. Why should people have premiums to start with? Because the people in charge of such firms have to make money!~ and I think this is the sick part - their making money is some how more important than our[the customer] wellbeing and as such we'll get the raw end of the deal, whatever and whenever any deal is struck.
I offer a completely different solution to your problem. Look at the system as a whole, notice the greed, thoughtlessness, and anti-community ideas it festers, and destroy it by any and all means, including but not limited to insurance fraud.GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
The store and other people who made the item lost the money.
So, hang on...
If I make an item, I have to pay $2 to the people who make the materials, and to my workforce. Someone steals it, then I'm $40 down. I make another one for another $2, sell it at a profit of $38, then by your reckoning, I've lost $2 (-40-2+40). So how is it that I'm $36 richer than I was when I started?
More to the point, if I haggled the price down to $20, does that mean the the seller has made a loss? I mean, he's $18 better off.
Even if you don't notice money out of your pocket (which you wouldn't, Mr. Thief), the company would notice its sales are less, and have to compensate for that somehow.
So you therefore think that competition should also be illegal. If I make the item that you're selling at $38 profit, and sell it at $28 profit, people will buy it from me. Does that mean that I'm stealing from you? Your sales are less, and you have to compensate for that somehow. Should I be taxed, and the money given to you because I'm trying to offer a better deal for the consumer?
This is another part of how economics works. Competition.
If I sell golden widgets for 40$, and they cost me 2$ to make, and you steal them -- I am losing money.
Unless I purposfully give something away, stealing it is still stealing.
"So how is it that I'm $36 richer than I was when I started?" You're 36$ richer, but you should've been 76$ richer. Notice how there's a 40$ difference -- that's because 40$ was stolen.
Now, in this contrived example, you're overly exagerating the profit margins here. There are a lot of middle men ensuring that optimal distrubitions of product are made in real life. Margins aren't that large. Theft drives up the cost for everyone. Go take any basic economics course.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Slavery was never supported by law. It was merely not prohibited by law. Those are two entirely different things.
Ahh. So the slaves stayed and worked for their masters because they felt like it? Shit no! They stayed there because the law supported slaveowners by assigning the legal category of 'slave' to certain persons, who were then considered subhuman by law and bound into slavery by social consensus.
Give me a fucking break, you clueless imbecile.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
None of you have included the effects of competition in your analyses.
Producers in a monopoly set the price that will create the greatest profit, and stick with it.
Producers in a freely competitive market have an entirely *different* set of rules, which have a tendency to decrease the cost of an item until it becomes arbitrarily close to the median variable cost of all producers competing in that market.
Theft/vandalism and other violations of the social contract raise the burden for all producers/retailers, directly increasing the resultant prices.
By most estimates, the cost of these problems is equivalent to >10% of inventory in many consumer goods fields.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
"Serial killers eat bread. Outlaw bread"
Please. The computer is the enabling factor here. How can you burn software without a PC?
If you can't think of a better argument than trying to tie in non-enabling factors as a straw man, then you've clearly not thought your side through, nor proven anything.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
"In this case copyright infringement had no affect on sales."
But how is it not stealing? How is in not wrong? I don't see where you put that.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
"Because studios do some research it and try to hit that magic price point to maximize profits."
and then later
"When it was released it has something like 6 forms of copy protection on it. In addition to cd checks and new media protections like Safedisk, it was one of the first 80 minute pressed cd's. Guess how much it sold for? Just as much as any other new game."
Maybe you haven't noticed, but all new games are sold at a certain price point. I didn't buy Blueshift when it was 60$ or 40$, because I didn't want it that much. Now, a couple of years later, it's 18$. How much is the software you give in your example now? Less, because that's how the price curve goes on PC software.
Copyright violations affect the total cost of it. Things like Everquest can't really be pirated, because they require online keys and such. You can get a mega pack of Everquest with all the expansions in a gold box for only 65$ CDN. I think this is a good indication of how all PC software could be priced, if piracy weren't as rampant.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Any econ teacher will tell you that. The government is a regulating factor in any economy. Without it, pure capitalism would be very bad. In this case, the government is stepping in to counteract the effects of the theft on one industry.
Yes, it's outside the bounds of capitalism because the government is interviening, but that doesn't mean it's wrong. I'd like to see how this plays out.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Maybe you don't understand. Plagarism is wrong, as is stealing my car. One is physical, one is not. However, in both cases, stealing == stealing.
Why is this so hard for you to understand?
In real life, you either buy something, or don't. You don't just steal as you like, because that breaks how society works.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
If I say, "illegal copyright violation" only nerds like you or I understand what I'm saying.
If I say, "piracy" -- everyone knows what I'm talking about. Kinda like when I say, "rape seed" -- I'm obviously not talking about semen leaking out of a sex crime victim. I'm talking about a particular cash crop grown in the prairie regions of north america.
If you don't like how the language is, go learn another one. I doubt the actions of a single entity will change English.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
If you are buying a copy second hand, that means the person you are purchasing it from has paid the content creator what they felt was an acceptable price. They've been paid for their work.
If you were only buying burnt CDs, well, that'd be different. In that case the original creators weren't paid for the content at all. The effects aren't the same.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I'm not sure what your problem with insurance companies, banks, etc, is. They don't have a gun to your head stating you have to buy their services. Don't like it? Don't buy it. It's a lot better way of influencing the market than angsting about it on some internet forum.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
"Are we going to systematically spread all injustices over the whole population? "
No. As the law states, it's only covering people who are most likely to violate IP laws (IE: people using devices which allow easy IP law violations). They already have taxes on blank CDs/etc in Canada, for example. That's just one example of this line of thought at work.
I think the biggest thing that annoyed me about the people in this thread, besides the whole, "I'm not stealing anything when I break the law" parts, was that none of these people were willing to sit down and see if the experimental legislation worked. You can't learn if you don't try new things, but a large bunch of the people who read Slashdot regularly don't like change. I, personally, hope the legistalion goes through. After a few years, everyone will know if it's a useful deterent or not, and if it helps companies keep their promise to produce more content.
Speaking of socialism: if you're like me and had to go to a doctor recently, you'll know that socialism doesn't suck. I mean, I don't have to use medical services often -- but every time I do I'm very happy that Trudeau socialized Canadian healthcare.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Some 14-year-old goes on a shooting spree, the government tries to make it harder for guns to get into 14-year-old hands.
Some 14-year-old goes on a copying spree, the government tries to make the loss offset by the cost of the computer involved.
Granted they aren't direct matches, but you should understand the gist of it.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
"Doesn't really sound like a good idea, does it ?"
Antibiotics don't sound like a good idea, if you present it the wrong way. Do you want the cast off poisons of molds injected directly into your circulatory system, where these fluids can interact with your most precious organs? No? Whyever not?
I'm interested to see if this works you. If it does, it's a model for something that other governments can apply. If, however, the producers do just produce crap music, then other countries can see to not apply that model.
Don't be so cynical about something that's not been tried. You can't go to the stars if you think you will fail.
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just a word to the socialists. they are (although crappy aswell) actually the best party here. I don't know if you have a picture of the so-called "christ-democrats", but... well. they suck... anyway, the taxes here are damn high. yes. but I don't actually think that it will result in a "lowering" of our standarts, because, as said before, PCs are quite cheap in this time... maybe we have to use the "older" ones a little longer (I'm typing this on a Athlon-550), but as long as they work it's perfectly ok.
When someone competes on price, they're not coming into my store and stealing something. Competition != stealing. Nor does that in any way justify stealing. Would you justify that homicide is ok? Just because there is doctor assisted suicide, that means it's ok for you to go to someone's house and murder them?
If the thief didn't want to pay for something, they shouldn't be stealing it. The cost was the possible profit you could've had.
The amounts are very not arbitrary. As I pointed out, you have no understanding of basic economics. You also seem to be in love with the idea that stealing isn't stealing. I'll leave you to smooch with that idea, since it's very ugly to me.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Any time you take something or get something which has a ticket price set on the economy without paying for it, you are stealing.
If you download files online which are not yours and which you haven't been given permission to, you are infringing on copyright.
Any time you reduce the number of possible sales, through things like copying items which you feel "shouldn't be scarce," you are stealing. In capitalism, people either pay for it, or they don't get it.
Economics is a science where the seller and buyer try to negotiate the fairist and most efficient price. Like any good experiment, the pricing set in economics needs proper control variables in place. When you steal or copy items without paying for them, you throw off the balance of the experiment.
The market can't find the proper spot when things like crime are affecting it. Copying stuff without permission is a crime. Just ask any writer if plagarism isn't a crime.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I said that this was an interesting way for the government to balance out loss from copyright infringement. You've been arguining all along with me, not realizing this.
You also make mistakes. "Copyright infringement does not involve taking anything. It involves creating something." -- incorrect. It involves copying something without permission.
In no way am I ignoring fair use. I've not mentioned it once. I merely said that, "So even if computers have legit uses, and even if you don't break the law, there are enough people out there misusing computers and breaking the law that bottoms lines are being affected. Naturally, businesses don't like this and are working to change it." That's the whole point of the legistlation, and something you still don't understand after several replies.
You also are trying to justify copyright infringement: "Copyright infringement is not theft." Copyright infringement is theft.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Copying is not stealing. Stealing is taking something from someone else. Copying something does not remove the original, and is not stealing. Violating copyright laws is illegal, but it is not stealing.
Clever signature text goes here.
Maybe you don't understand. Plagarism is wrong, as is stealing my car.
Maybe you don't understand. Murder is wrong, as is stealing my car.
One is physical, one is not.
One is violent, one is not.
However, in both cases, stealing == stealing.
Wait - what? - never mind
Why is this so hard for you to understand?
Dunno, you must be far more clever than the rest of us!
In real life, you either buy something, or don't. You don't just steal as you like, because that breaks how society works.
Aww, I think I'm going to cry!
Fair use is implied permission that is recognized by law.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Where is this magic market where there is 0 copyright infringement? I'd like to see the numbers of this control group to compare with the normal market.
You can't make assertations unless you have numbers to back them up. Otherwise you're only sharing your opinion, not a measured truth.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
"Why is competition not stealing if it causes me to make a loss?"
:)
It doesn't cause a loss as your products are being substituted for products from another vendor. Stealing is not the same as this since it is the willful deprivation of a product from a vendor without compensation. Copyright infringement is a special case since, while you aren't depriving a vendor of a specific copy of the product, you are depriving them of a sale. It's like cigarettes -- they don't kill you immediately, but you will live a shorter life.
"Never said stealing was okay. Just have an issue that the loss is the amount that you assume someone will pay."
Well, if the person's not willing to pay for the product, they can live without. The opprotunity cost is obviously too high for them -- otherwise they would buy it.
"but I'm not going to foool myself into believing that that thief would have spent $40 on the item he stole when he may not have paid for it at all."
Ahh, but you don't know that. The only way you could know that is to cook up a specific example with the values fixed so that you already knew the outcome anyway, which would make the conversation academic.
"So, if I put a price tag of $1 000 000 on a loaf of bread, and someone steals it, I've lost $1 000 000 even if I can replace it for 30c? Nobody was ever going to give me that much for the loaf. "
In a world where no one else has bread, you could quite possibly get that money. You're ignoring scarcity and the price elasticity of demand in this contrived example (you really should stop using them, they only cloud the issue).
"Yes they are. If you set a price, you pick arbitrarily. You choose that amount you think people will pay."
Maybe to someone who hasn't studied economics these seem arbitrary, the same way that people who haven't studied biology think that creatures look very arbitrary (inshead of being shaped by the environment).
"My understanding of basic economics statres that if I have $36 more than when I started, I've made a profit."
This would be why you won't be making any guest speaking appearances at universities that teach economics
"No. I'm just resigned to the idea that stealing is something that happens."
So do a lot of things in life. The best thing to do is reduce it (and its influence) as much as possible, and that's what the legislation proposed is all about.
"Stealing is also something that cannot be adjusted by the business model."
That's why the government is involved in the system. Basic laws and law enforcement are a big part of the underpinnings of a proper economic system. Business can't be conducted without some basic agreements.
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on reflection, i think we may actually have a lot more common than i thought. that was an interesting reply.
in the meanwhile, i'll up your idea one - - as i don't have insurance, and i don't use banks. oh wait? how about i don't let them have any of my money and then proceed to give other people [who may or may not exist, here on slashdot...you all could be bots for all i care] ideas, in an attempt to incite some sort of riot mindset---i alone can't make even a dent on this world but a million pissed off ubergeeks would make at least a good sized smoking hole---. spread the bad vibes around like liquid mold! piss eachother off until no one know who they are any more! angst all over the forums until the walls bleed! mabye when everyone looses their rationality and cool the world, the half abortion it is, will finally choke. burn it! burn it all! anihliate it! it doesn't deserve to stand here. the chance was given, and it was abused. so be it.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
And teenagers with too much time on their hands.
These are the same people who nibble away at industry profits, and are the people who can and will be affected by this tax.
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Why don't you go back and reread it. Unless you have a better solution to getting back revenue lost to piracy, I don't think you're making a positive contribution.
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