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Microsoft Told to Pay Tax on License Fee
MissingRainbow writes "To avoid paying taxes in India, Microsoft wanted a court to believe that it is selling its product and that there are no royalty payments involved. Their own EULA worked against them in this particular case however as it states, "the product is licensed, not sold". The court ruled against them."
I suggest two new tags - 'pwndbyowneula' or 'canthaveitbothways' (although the old faithful 'haha' adequately expresses the extent of my sympathy for MS).
Oh, and for those wondering, RS 700 crore == 175 Million USD. (a crore is 10 million).
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Washington State Legislators (who are greatly funded by Microsoft employees and corporate donations) have refused to close this $528 billion tax loophole ... yes Billion!
How appropriate, that in India, the birthplace of Karma, Microsoft gets whacked with a hefty dose of it.
Anybody want my mod points?
Let me be the third to say, "Ha ha."
This must mean that 2008 will be the year of Linux on the desktop!
Your thoughts form your reality.
He who lives by the EULA, dies by the EULA
leave the slashdot gui alone!
You said billion twice for emphasis, even though it clearly says million even in the article's damn title.
is almost 145 million $
Oooops - you are totally right! $528 million $528 million $528 million $528 million $528 million
There's a lot of professionally-unemployed meth addicts in the Puget Sound area who could REALLY use some more welfare!
How much longer will evil profit makers be able to keep money they make? Its a shame! Employing people at the expense of non-working people! For shame!
THL phish sticks
Maybe instead a Borg Bill should be portrayed as Pinocchio.
... yes Million!
Remember the old "After Dark" screensaver suite for Windows 3.1? The one with the infamous "Flying Toasters" screensaver?
What Vista needs is a "Flying Chairs" screensaver. Especially in light of the furniture that became airborne in Redmond at receipt of this news.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
700 crore INR in USD = 175 million U.S. dollars = 111 million Euros
1 Indian crore = 10 million
Would have been nice if they'd given a little leeway for those server-farms in WA State though.
I live but a mile or two from the datacenter being build by Sabey that T-Mobile wishes to relocate ALL their datacenter activities (for the USA) to.
So much for the Westside giving a damn about the Eastside of the State.
What's a crore? Are they paying in bananas?
BTW, GP...That's $528 Million, that's MILLION, as stated by your own article.
That's estimated to have saved them half a billion over 11 years by that article's author. Still would have been nice to have for the Alaskan Way Viaduct, I suppose.
That would be the "Total Cost of Pwnership!"
Damnit! I have gone for YEARS without using the term or anything similar simply because I thought it was stupid. Now look who's doing it?
That even MS employees don't read the EULA...
last seen on CNBC TV, India, the channel asked one of MS's lawyers, who said some ruling/ past precedent of a royalty payment case was in their favor, and that they have a strong case and are very very comfortable. also, microsoft seem to have multiple layers of companies in India to sell/ license mswindows and msoffice. that kind of insulates them and passes the buck to these subsidiary.
kinda sick to note that microsoft charges an arm and a leg for their software, but they evade taxes. (on a second note, India does have a double-taxation avoidance treaty with USA, so I'm not entirely sure if microsoft has paid its taxes in the USA for those sales in India. if they have paid it - its absolutely fine, else its mighty cheap of them)
So do terrorist software pirates pay tax? Nope http://w3.bsa.org/thailand/press/newsreleases/IDC-Study.cfm
Well look who is in the same boat...
realkiwi
I just wish I could view Slashdot without having to turn up the font size every time. Just because I *can* read 9-pixel text doesn't mean I want to.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
So they would owe over 3 billion dollars! Wow.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
So you are not a believer of the prophesied 1000 year reign of the Microsoft? Those numbers do add up.
Great piece of evidence in any Microsoft-unfair-business-practices lawsuit, establishing their basis, motive, and degree of integrity.
The Wolfpack Project: BitCoin + Crowdfunding = Political Accountability
Have both been selling machines with Linux for many years. HP offers Linux on, I believe, nearly every box they sell and drivers for nearly every printer.
Instead let's talk instead about the eee PC from ASUS, and the clones of it, and all those hot new cheap mini laptops and mobile internet devices based on Intel's Atom that won't run Vista.
Microsoft had better pay their taxes while they still can.
XP dies in June. Unless they extend it every last one of those boxes is going out the door with Intel's MobiLinux or a distro that supports that platform. Let's talk about BMW, where Linux comes standard with many models.
Forget Linux on the desktop. 2008 is the year of Linux in your pocket, in your dashboard, in your cable box, on your lap and bringing the third world online without contributing too much to global warming. Desktop? What do you need a desk for any more? Next year that question may read "What's a desk?"
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You can't always get what you want
The article implies that there neither sales tax nor company income tax (of the MS subsidiary/partner) exists in India. Is this the case? Is the tax on royalties the only tax income the Indian people get from software peddlers in India?
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
Seriously, misrepresenting news in order to get people to read it? I'd expect that from Fox or CBS, but posting this rubbish on slashdot, that's just pathetic.
Bean counters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crore
I guess Apple wants to limit Safari for Windows to Macs running Windows via Boot Camp (or whatever it is named now). So it does not completely ban itself.
But I still think it is a stupid decision. They are limiting the market share of their product, in an area where a popular free alternative exists with Firefox. This is not like using MacOS to push hardware sales.
C - the footgun of programming languages
slashdot.jp retains the layout that was here before the comments pages started being subjected to all these annoying experiments.
The only thing that slightly worries me about this: if the EULA is what is causing MS to pay the tax, then in paying the tax, MS can clearly say that the EULA is valid (in India at least) as the government has demanded legal taxes based on it.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet;
A chrysanthemum by any other name would be easier to spell
Agreed. Maybe if they made Slashdot look like this we'd actually get some work done?
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
Your sig agrees with your sentiment.
I don't know much about the demographics of the area, but I really doubt that a signifigant portion of the population are meth addicts, nor probably a large percentage of those evil poor people. I rather doubt that this tax money would be quickly sent to that small portion of meth addicts (or even those damn people poorer than you), but would probably be distributed to other programs, like... hmmm.. roads, hospitals, police, fire, etc... You might, though, have to share these with those damn slackers, which is sad, since I'm sure they would rather not be burdened with more elitist, faux bourgeoisie, greedy rich people bandying about their self-interested ideas of entitlement.
Why should corporations pay taxes, or at least obey the law? The society in which corporations are enmeshed are largely responsible for their prosperity, and thus they owe some level of entitlement towards the society as a whole.
I'm not a socialist, I just think some people fail to realize that in many cases poverty is outside of the control of the individual. Either that or they have to decide this to justify their own crass greed. But then again I'm one of those loons that puts human life, health, and happiness above little green slips of paper.
down mod at will.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Wait until you see "Vista for MID". You'll think Windows ME or Windows Mobile was the second coming of Brian Kernighan.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Maybe he meant to put a . in front of the 528? ;-)
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
For the record, the full name for these "points" is "basis points". See Investopedia: basis point and Wikipedia: basis point.
Korma whoring will get you everywhere, my friend
which is totally what she said
There is a massive margin around comments section now, for some unbeknown reason. I cannot fathom why anyone would pad the entire comment thread in this way. Here's what appears to be the offending CSS, from the comments.css sheet.
#commentlisting (line 110)
{
padding-top: 2em;
padding-right: 2em;
padding-bottom: 2em;
padding-left: 2em;
}
There's more padding on the comments section than an asylum isolation cell. This is an abomination on Firefox 2.0.0.8, and I imagine everything else. Worse than the Big Grey Buttons by far.
Does Taco even run these designs past anyone before they're rolled out. Wait, I'm guessing they get marketroids and graphics artists to run "surveys" on 15 year old Myspace users first.
The big redesign was actually fine. This isn't. Seriously.
May the Maths Be with you!
... but if you add a UserContent.css to your Firefox-profile's chrome/-directory with the following:
.nbutton {
.nbutton p b a {
background: white ! important;
padding: 0 0 ! important;
margin:0 ! important;
}
text-decoration: underline ! important;
font-style: italic ! important;
color: black ! important ;
background: white ! important;
padding: 0 0 ! important;
margin:0 ! important;
}
It look's pretty decent again...
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
or, you know, repairing the 520 bridge before it sinks to the bottom of the lake?
How many MS employees use that bridge every day to get the Redmond campus?
What really disappoints me is how greedy a company can get. They lie to avoid paying taxes in India when they make billions in revenue a year. I guess making billions isn't enough for them.
Drugs designed in stateA should be taxed by stateA regardless of where they are manufactured, bought or consummed?
I like the Ajaxiness.
This is Slashdot. It bloody well needs to be completely usable without Javascript. What do they think this is, ZDNet?
I agree with what you say Omestes, but you missed an important point.
When the government draws up a budget, they determine how much money they are going to need to spend, then decide where they are going to get the money from. By not taking the $528 million from the big greedy corporations, they need to adjust the tax rate of the citizens to compensate. So in essence, that $528 million is coming directly out of your pocket.
The drug heads, bums, and other burdens on society are part of living in a civilized community. I would like to see laws allowing the incarceration of drug users for their own help, but that's just me.
If *I* were the judge, I would be sorely tempted to rule that since a fine, upstanding corporation like MS would never cheat on taxes or lie in court, they must have enclosed the EULA in error since it cannot be compatible with a sale. As it was a simple error, there's no need to get all upset, we'll just call it null and void and move on.
The treaty is based on the model treaty of the Organization for Economic Development ("OECD"). Article 7 of OECD treaties says there is no withholding tax on sales, while Article 12 says that there may be up to a 15% withholding tax on royalties.
As much as I might like to say "ha ha, its MS", there is a real question here. Does the customer buy the package software, or the license to use the software?
This issue won't work in India's favour. They may collect more tax but Indian business will be hurt as we would charge extra if there is withholding tax. Also, Indian companies can expect the same treatment when selling their software to other countries, as well.
Treaties are a two way street.
According to Intel a core is part of a processor (the core 2 duo having two single core processors). So microsoft will be paying in processors which India will need to run vista. I am hoping that microsoft will pay using Intel or AMD and not VIA chips though...
I hadn't thought about it before, but considering what the RIA/MPA/BSA and such are costing us in court time and enforcement, perhaps it's time to crank up the royalty tax rates to offset the costs (and I would assume that payments for permission to use patents should also count as "royalties", yes?).
Certainly a substantial increase in the royalty tax rate should perhaps be a part of any "intellectual property" "reform" bill as proposed by those who profit from it (and perhaps this would encourage people to go back to actually SELLING things and slow the stampede towards the "bribe someone for permission to use under restricted conditions" model...)
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
For computer programmers/geeks recompiling is not an issue. We know how/where to go look for and get a compiler. Do you think the average joe is going to know what a compiler is? They want to install and go. They do not want to compile, wait they need to get the compiler first if it is not there. You cannot assume that everyone will know how to get the extra steps needed to get the job done. Getting the compiler, compiling the program, making the executable are steps that the average joe has no idea about. Running the program, that they know. Yes apt-get/yum/package manager does a lot of this already which is great. But for things not in those lists the average joe will have a hard. And that will be a strike against the average joe using linux and a plus for apple/windows.
If its good enough for India its good enough for the rest of us. I bought a product, not just a license.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This seems like they got self-pwned, but it may actually be intentional. Think about it - the court just asserted that their EULA is valid, and that they license software, not sell it. It's exactly what they want.
12% = 1200 basis points. They announce on the U.S. news that the Fed lowered rates by 75 basis points , where a basis point is 1/100 of a percentage point, which is 1/100 of the whole. 75 basis points is the difference between 5.00% and 5.75%. And is three-quarters of a "point". Confusing, to be sure.
"Points" are used in lending to indicate 1% of the loan value - known from their use in calculating the origination fee ("pay 1 point"), or as a metric for determining the cost to buy down the interest rate ("it costs half a point to buy down the rate from 6.75% to 6.40%"). It is short for "percentage point".
"Basis points" are commonly known from their use in monitoring small, constant movements in the yield of debentures - e.g. "an 20 bp move in the 2 year treasury which lowered the yield from 2.24% to 2.06%."
Do we have to expect and then forgive this kind of obvious shysty behavior by our corporate citizens?
Companies are petrified of "leaving money on the table", another way of saying that if they don't try to glean the profits By Any Means Necessary then another company will, and they will fail. Or be quickly punished by Wall Street.
And we are all okay with this business model based on desperation, clawing and scamming and cheating...or at least pushing the edge of decency to absurd limits.
So here we have a company, a country, a civilization that values and rewards cheating the system as far as it can get away with...which is only known in hindsight, as the raw and unapologetic greed that is required to succeed in this world inevitably leads to certain kinds of blindness.
You know the type: not really seeing the poverty of your fellow humans, the destruction of the environment, the wars and civil strife...we sort of acknowledge that it's there but we refuse to honestly admit the causes and will not genuinely cooperate with the solutions.
Because doing that might result in us "leaving money on the table"...for someone else! God forbid someone else rush in and fuck over the people in search of profits instead of us!
Suffice to say, this is a perfect example of a company knowingly gaming the system, because everyone expects (nay---demands!) them to in order to survive.
Great world, you assholes! Competition is good, sure. But is it so good that we forsake our humanity?
(nope, I'm not mad at MS...why should they pay a tax that they might not have to pay? But how do you know if you have to pay it? Well...just try to not pay it as hard as you can. You will soon have your answer!)
Nelson says, "Ha ha"
...now they are only charging half what it used to cost, which is still 100% more than a free torrent to a pirate who simply *must* have Vista (for some unfathomable reason).
And, for those of us who prefer not to break the law, that 'half off' price is still 100% more than just about any given Linux distro.
A Linux distro which, BTW, will have more capabilities, better security, faster updates, more and better default applications, likely free office suite, and in fact more of just about anything you can name than a default MS OS install will have.
Except of course, the ridiculous "security" prompts, bloatware and crapware...
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
While the vast majority of HP printers I've used have worked on 'nix, many of the more recent ones (USB printers in particular) have been a huge pain-in-the-ass to get working, requiring that firmware be sent to the printer on bootup/connection, etc.
HP's linux support isn't really all that good. Most of what I've seen has been developed by third-parties.
$100,000 Other Income: Undisclosed source
Chances are the IRS might very well be happy with that. Unless, of course, they investigated to see if you were making more income than just the undisclosed amount.
...but wouldn't it have to be an ongoing payment in order to count as a royalty, instead of the one-time purchase you make at the computer store or where ever?
Rob
Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!
::crosses fingers::
Thanks to all who have replied in this thread!! I have been complaining about this since it first started changing. Do any of you realize that, as of this writing, we have taken up 50% of the page complaining about this fucking system - IN THE MIDDLE OF A MICROSOFT DISCUSSION?!?!? That's gotta say something, doesn't it, Taco?
Taco, now do you finally believe me? This system sucks sweaty, flea infested donkey balls!!
Here's a suggestion: A lot of people have signed up for UID's, which means that they can save their viewing preferences. So, did it occur to you that you can get an idea of how many people hate this fucking system, by looking at their user preferences to see how many people turn this piece of shit off?
Now maybe you'll get the hint?
Please, please, please!!
Most everybody moved to network printing years ago. It's working out fine.
In fact, a lot of direct attached peripherals can go away. Gigabit networks are fine for most stuff you used to attach devices directly to your PC for.
HP supports linux. They have for a long time. Kernel.org runs on servers donated by HP and they have since 2001. Third party support for HP gear is also strong as you note. I only wish they'd wake up and start using it for their web server. Their site is hideous and slow, and for the most part their web stuff is IE only. Other than that, good on them.
Let me quote for you from a history article:
'nuff said.
Help stamp out iliturcy.