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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).
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.
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.
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
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
And now they're proposing yet more legislation to levy further "taxes for the poor starving musicians and movie stars". Given that they've so far failed to distribute previous levies, why would anyone have confidence that further levies would be distributed, but would rather go towards someone's retirement fund (or whatever)??
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!
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.
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.
Do you have to register your beer to prove you paid your sales tax on it?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
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.
Even illegat... uh, illeget... uh, pirot... uh, w4r3z3d copies of Office include a spell checker. Give it a try.
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.
Piracy won't be effected. But eliminating the middlemen may significantly reduce copyright infringment. (Word choice clouds the debate. Not just "piracy"- things like "evaporate" polarizes something that's really a continuum. No crime can be eliminated completely, but that's not required)
Copyright infringment has more and more complex motivations than wanting something for nothing:
(Additionally, getting music off P2P isn't "something for nothing"- it's not completely free- it takes some investment of time and effort to find these things and download them. Only worth pennies, maybe, but they "pay" something, just like we "pay" to watch TV by the time wasted in commercials)
Focusing on the thought process of the representative college student:
An album of 10 songs often costs more than $1.50 each. Only a minority of that cash goes to recording/editing costs and compensating the musicians- most of it goes to publisher, for marketing and profit. College students aren't fond of those bland men with ties, and are less inclined to give money than if it was going more directly to the artist.
If each song cost $0.50 or $0.75 (reasonable I think, if advertising and distribution is taken out), then we might come to an equilibrium where it's not fear of law enforcement that makes students pay for their music, but peer pressure. If the cost is reduced, and convenience is increased (with something like micropayments, prehaps), and purchasers feel the money is going straight to the musician (with whom they often feel an emotional bond), then the incentive to "pirate" is much reduced, and the personal guilt from violations is increased. ("Oh my god, I stole like $2.50 from Jewel. I am SO lame! I'll click those 3 payment buttons right now")
Consumers will have much less motivation to load files onto P2P if they're already available for quick download elsewhere. Student roommates won't view duplicating a CD as striking a blow against the establishment. Courtney Love won't proclaim that the labels are robbing her, but instead might remind listeners to double-click the tip jar.
Voluntary compliance is not impossible. I can't claim it will happen, but neither can anyone else prove it won't.
(An additional benefit to the entire culture might be that, with publishing house's ad budgets devastated, popular music will become more varied. There could be less winner-take-all homogenization. Maybe, thousands of musicians will earn $70,000 per year, instead of hundreds getting $millions and the rest washing dishes as day jobs.)
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