Windows Buyers Pay Patent Tax of $21.50 ?

An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica has a story up about an estimate done by the Software Freedom Law Center of how much purchasers of Microsoft Windows are paying in 'patent taxes'. 'SFLA took the total of $4.3 billion dollars in legal costs for Microsoft from 2001 to 2004 and divided it by estimated sales of Windows XP over the same period — approximately 200 million copies — to come up with the $21.50 estimate. The organization added that North American and European customers, who pay more for Windows licenses than customers in other parts of the world, actually ended up paying more of this patent tax, and that people who pirate Windows pass their share of the tax on to paying customers.' The article goes on to point out several flaws in the study's logic. For example, the actual cost of a Windows OEM hasn't increased in the last few years; Microsoft isn't passing this cost directly on to the consumer."

Comments

Everybody Pays the M$ Tax.

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Casino logic won't work here, the money comes from you and me.

Secondly, this is BS. It ignores the fact that MS sold more products in that period that just WinXP than just an OS, things like Office.

First, don't call me a "consumer". At best, I'm your customer. The term "consumer" is insulting and inaccurate. The dollars I pay, unfortunately, don't make Windoze go away.

Second, the 4.3 billion dollars M$ spent on patents don't magically disappear because you can't figure out which M$ customers actually paid the price up front. Everyone who buys anything has paid their share of the M$ tax because everyone who buys M$ passes the costs on to their customers. When I buy something from a company that does not use M$, my cost may be lower because they saved themselves the primary inefficiency of Windoze use. That company still has to buy suppliers and so on and so forth, until you get the entire M$ annual revenue. Because M$ is a convicted coercive monopolist, it's hard to avoid paying their tax because they make it difficult for anyone to by anything else. Even the lower cost of avoiding M$ are a part of the M$ burden.