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Dutch Pass iPod Tax
An anonymous reader writes "The Register is reporting that in a few short months a proposal to tax all MP3 players in the Netherlands will become law. The levy taxes 3.28 euros ($4.30 US) for every gigabyte of capacity. This means a 60GB iPod Photo will be hit for an additional 196 euros ($258), all of it going to the record industry's copyright collection agencies. And they call file sharers thieves?"
Well I'm an American that went to grad school in the Netherlands and in my personal opinion it seems that much is changing in the Netherlands for the worse. There is a lot of pressure being put on their government by the United States, which just adds to the current tensions.
A lot of the "problems" the United States has the Netherlands shares, like immigration (the Turkish, etc.). I absolutely loved the two years I spent there and only hope that they don't buy into the US corporate way of messing stuff up.
This iPod tax seems completely absurd and I hope that this proposal is just that, a proposal and nothing more. Just my two euros...
196 euro extra?! Does it even cost that much?
I'd just buy a MP3 player that has low onboard memory, but that takes removable memory. Voila! Less than 5 bucks o' tax, infinite memory.
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
Anyway, who is to say they won't turn around and start using this as a precedent?
After all, people use their ISP connections to "steal" their music, buy hard drives to store their "stolen" music, buy CPUs to run media player applications to listen to their "stolen" music.... etc
Where will they draw the line? When will they stop?
Besides, why do they just tax the iPod only? What about other mp3 players? What about cell phones with mp3 capabilities? Heck, what about pocket PCs and other PDAs even?
I think Apple's popularity has came back to bite Apple in their gonads...
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
Fortunately, if you had RTFA, you would have seen that this law is not yet passed. It's only a proposal, and therefore likely to be the starting point of negotiations.
From the article...
The idea of all levy based legislation is that some form of copyright collections agency collects tax by imposing a surcharge at the point of sale for any storage devices that could possibly be used to store pirated works.
Already in Germany there is a levy on PC hard drives, that will soon become larger than the entire PC industry revenue if it is left in place. Within two years, as disk drive sizes move to terabyte class on notebooks, and petabyte levels on home DVRs, the tax will come to far outweigh not just the cost of the drive, but the cost of the device. Under this Netherlands law, if it were extended to the PC, the cost of 1,000 GB would be 3,280 ($4,300) and yet drives of this size will be delivered by 2007.
Sell the damn things without drives and have people buy the drives as DRIVES - separately. How asinine this is - especially for a Euro country!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Apple could sell iPods there with removable hard drives. Buy an iPod with 0 memory and then purchase a mini HDD as a separate item. Combine the two and evade the tax.
Yes, I understand that the tax applies to every mp3 player. Everyone could do the same thing.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
If my entire use of my audio equipment is to record and playback music that I have written, performed, and recorded, is it fair to ask me to pay this tax?
It's not a hypothetical question. I use my musical gear exclusively for music that I write, perform and record myself.
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Regardless of this apparent fluke, many Northern European countries have much more progressive laws concerning IP and copyrights (and most other things for that matter). This tax is being proposed by the record industry, so the motivations are questionable. Do you think they are trying to preserve the artistic soul of their product by trying to stem illegal downloading, or just trying to turn a buck?
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the frumious Bandersnatch.
Tax every removable media: SD, cF, MS...
et voila ! more tax money.
--- Back to the trees, back to the trees !
Actually this 'bill' is being initiated by the Foundation for the Home Copy and has not been passed yet. The weird thing is that there are a couple of those 'foundations' which are supposed to be not for profit. If you startup a new restaurant of something along the lines you will get about (no joke) 20 of such foundations asking for money.
BUT it is very difficult to find out were the money they make is going to.
- In Memoriam: Jeroen de Bruin (1972-2004), bye bro
Interesting that you should mention such a bizarre term as "illegal downloading".
As of June 1st, downloading copyrighted material without permission will also be illegal in Sweden. Progressive indeed...
(Distributing (spreading, uploading, selling et c.) someone else's intellectual property without permission has naturally "always" been illegal here.)
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Then again it's a bollocksy proposal. Never mind that blank media and hard disks are not always used to store copies of protected works; the real problem is that very little of the collected money finds its way into the pockets of the mucisians whose work is being copied. This is like collecting toll on a bridge you don't own, from people who are not crossing it.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
This logic is great. It works well for struggling third-world African nations, so it should work well in Europe and the US as well! If that's your solution to a proposed surcharge on iPods in the Netherlands, I'd love to see what your solution to a genuine concern would be.
I also enjoy how you can't say copying other's copy-righted works without paying is "stealing" without 5 or 6 angry replies, but putting a fully-disclosed surcharge on a luxury item is an obvious example of thievery and stealing. Not to say I support the surcharge, but this manipulation of language to suit the group-view strikes me as a bit ugly.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
I can play mp3s on every single computer I have, and collectively, my computers have over 1tb of disk. Does that mean that if I lived in The Netherlands, I'd need to pay US$5000 in *TAX* to the recording industry on my *COMPUTER* storage?!?
Next, someone will propose a tax on raw hard drives just because someone might put MP3s on it???
Come on!
Because they were the ones who paid the politicians to draft, advocate and pass the law. Don't make the mistake of thinking that only the US suffers from this problem. Any country with a large, highly centralised government (which is pretty much the entire Western World) is going to suffer from the same issue.
It doesn't happen that way here in Sweden. And I'm sure there are many countries where that is not the case. I think what's important is that there is some choice, the fact that we have seven governmental parties puts some pressure on the top ones, if they would appear to sell them out to corporate interests, they'd instantly lose lots of votes to smaller parties with similar politics.
Don't make general conclusions out of some few countries. Not every western country has such bad political system as USA have. It is, for sure, possible to not let the large companies rule the country as they wish.
am i paying for the media or the quota of the media ? if i buy 'x' amount of storage, why not associate it with the amount of space? since, in case if the ipod or whatever goes phut or stolen, my tax money goes waste. so why not pay it for the 'x' number of gbs. create a license for the same. that ways - i buy 200 gbs of quota from the government. and the tax stays for whatever number of years. or does it ?
it opens up new avenues. what if the storage becomes cheaper ? does the tax stay uniform ? one of these days samsung or such volume players, decide that holographic storage is the way to go, and offers 150 terabytes on disk space from, say, the coming xmas season. how much tax do i pay then? this whole tax thing is crazy. this whole tax scene for something intangible as this is really, really crazy!!!
I get more and more discusted by these MAFIA organisations, who are somehow legalised by the Dutch government.
Don't get sick from it. Quit giving them money.
As an ISP's technology and security officer, I've had to deal with numerous Harry Potter intellectual property owner demands. These people have repeatedly disregarded the actual law, e.g. notification through registered agent and specified process, and routinely strong-arm ISPs as follows:
o provide an IP address that was the alleged offender, without naming the file, evidence that the file was their property, nor the actual TIME of the event. As if the whole damn Internet is static IPs! (we have 60% of our customer base obtaining dynamic allocations via PPPoE, so a single IP address is meaningless without other data).
o demand immediate termination of the customer using that IP address. Per the previous point, this would most likely shut down a completely unrelated customer, causing them serious impairment to their business and subjecting the ISP to liability (not to mention lost revenues). This, btw, is probably how all the 85-year-old grandmas are getting named in RIAA/MPAA DMCA suits. Someone please give them an Internet for Dummies class quick.
o demand naming the customer's name, business, address, etc. Again, this is not in compliance with the law that they clearly are aware of yet disregard (if they are so willing to ignore the law, why should file sharers care either?)
o threaten your upstream NSP with legal emails saying if you don't comply with their demand, the upstream must shut your entire network off. Usually they provide 48 hours until they claim they'll escalate it.
Our response has always been legal back to them (that is the only language these people understand). We remind them of the law, the registered agent they ignored, the liability they now may possess having ignored that, and a CLEAR specification of the information required in order for us to identify the alleged party. We send the reply via email and cc to registered mail (very much recommended as it puts them on notice that you're tracking this). Be sure to do this on your attorney's letterhead (sent from your attorney) as this means you're being advised by someone who ought to know the law. Finally, make sure you notify your upstream provider of all of this communication, along with language from your attorney that reminds them that they may be liable should any harm come to your network given how you have complied with the law in your response. As always, if you can push a matter out of some clerical techie's hands and into an upper manager (who is probably fearful of screwing up), you're more likely to prevail.
But back to the point: if you want to keep this RIAA and MPAA nonsense up, keep spending money on their movies, books, music, etc. My son is a big Harry Potter fan, but our family will not spend one dime on anything related to that franchise due to them being placed on my ban list. If an inquiry can cause lost legitimate sales, it'll get their attention. Right now, they believe they have nothing to lose.
It's not a good idea. It's a horrible idea. Just like I don't like paying tax for the healthcare of people I don't know, and just how I don't like putting money into someone's else's "retirement fund," I don't want to pay for other people to download music. It's not going to benefit me, so I, along with a lot of other people, would want no part of it.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
Now remeber children, once you've paid your pirate tax, it's OK to download anything you want. Go a head, you already paid the fine. If they try to sue you, just argue that if they can do that, then there is no point for the tax. They either have to choose one or the other.
Which we have in the US too, and same result.
I actually got a home stereo CD recorder (free), but I have never hooked it up as it will only work with audio CD-R discs, and I see no advantage.
It will make a digital copy if the source is a pressed CD, but if the source is a CDR it will go through a digital-analog-digital conversion first.
Stupid stupid stupid.
This is the same government who are now passing all kinds of other idiot laws and done things that make the American government look positively enlightened:
- Everyone who has less than 8 years of education in the country (except other EU citizens), no matter what their passport, will have to take a test to show that they are "integrated" into local society. If you don't, you'll pay repeated fines until you do pass the test.
- To move to the country, you'll have to show that you've learned Dutch first.
- Cut government spending in times of economic downturns, while boosting in times of economic growth (everywhere else in the world, it's the reverse).
- Looked at making criminal punishments relevant to your ethnicity.
- Proposed vigoursly pursuing a campaign against female circumcision (when was this a problem in NL?), but after a rash of (Dutch, white) family murder-suicides claimed that the number was lower than in the past and nothing needed to be done.
Need I continue? This tax will definitely make it into law.
Honestly, universal health care scares me a bit. I had cancer last year, and I'm on an email list of people with the same cancer. The people on the list from Canada have huge waits just to see doctors... Some of them had to wait a month to get a biopsy, then another 2-3 months to actually start chemo. I had my biopsy the same week the xrays found tumors, and I started chemo less than 2 weeks after my biopsy. My cancer was already at a very, very advanced stage - if I'd had to wait another 2-3 months to start chemo, I could have died. If universal health care comes with those kinds of problems, I don't want it.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.