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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)
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..."
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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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.
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.