Slashdot Mirror
Portugal Is Considering a "Terabyte Tax"
An anonymous reader writes "As a proposal to avoid becoming the 'next Greece', a Portuguese opposition party has proposed a tax on storage. The party claims that the tax will not effect the average citizen and is mostly levied at business users, but internal storage on mobile phones means a 64GB iPhone could be €32 more expensive. From the article: 'The proposal would have consumers paying an extra €0.2 per gigabyte in tax, almost €21 extra per terabyte of data on hard drives. Devices with storage capacities in excess of 1TB would pay an aggravated tax of 2.5 cents per GB. That means a 2TB device will in fact pile on €51.2 in taxes alone (2.5 cents times 2048GB). External drives or “multimedia drives” as the proposed bill calls them, in capacities greater than 1TB, can be taxed to the tune of 5 cents per gigabyte, so in theory, a 2TB drive would cost an additional €103.2 per unit (5 cents times 2048GB)."
carry on.
Before long, Spain will have its Gigabyte Tax
Italy will chime in with its own Megabyte Tax
And Greece? They'll have the honor of having the world's first Kilobyte Tax
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Perhaps that's the idea. This is a copyright-inspired effort, after all - and with the move to the cloud and it's inherent ease of central control, perhaps the thinking behind such high taxes is that ordinary people cannot be trusted with so much storage of their own. They might misuse it for piracy.
**OLD** This law draft was already discarted like 2 moths ago.
Doubling the price of a 2Tb external drive? You're going to have to pirate a *shitload* of stuff to make up for that.
Am I the only one that thinks that people might finally complain that they're paying tax on the extra 24 MB in every GB without getting them?
As far i know ( i live in Portugal ) other than this being old news, it was rejected by all other parties other than the one attempting to get this passed and was rather laughed about because of it here.
A tax that increases at an exponential rate, what more could a government hope for!
As long as:
1. The revenue doesn't go to the **AA
2. Large businesses do not pay less than consumers.
Then it's just another tax, which is something the PIIGS countries need. And I doubt this could pass in the US, the cloud would become much less fashionable.
As I understand EU free-trade rules, as long as the appropriate taxes are paid in the country where goods are bought (inside the EU), the government cannot then levy additional taxes when imported, either directly (in the boot of a car) or when shipped.
So this just seems a great proposal to kill all domestic sales of electronic goods with drives in - iPads, smartphones, photocopiers, laptops - and relocate them to Spain instead. I'm sure the Spanish government wouldn't mind, but it doesn't like it's going to do much to help Portugese debt.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
It was not a proposal to avoid becoming 'the next Greece'. It was a proposal to "help" artists.
In reality it was just another levy (we have several) to benefit some corrupt goons on a local "rights" association. And as you might guess it, they don't help artists that much. Just their pockets.
It's old because the parliament shot it down after an active online campaign by internet activists and a couple of politicians with common sense.
... how do they expect this to work !? People will simply buy storage in other EU countries. But I doubt anyway that such a farce could ever pass.
The Portuguese citizens opposed such an abuse so strongly, that the Socialist Party retreated removing the law project before it was flunked.
However, their most faithful member Antonio Vitorino is heading an European Community consultation on private copy levies which is adamant about considering as non constructive comments that consider it an abuse that must end (as most people think).
So weird to see such an outdated article in /.
So weird to see such an outdated article in /.
I don't think that is weird at all in Slashdot
IMO It's a move by SPA (Sociedade Portuguesa de Autores) to try to get money to artists (that do not produce anything new and want to live off best-ofs released every once in a while).
As with every tax, the cost will eventually propagate to the public and will add nothing more than complications to a system that should be efficient.
If applied it would keep the country in the age of cement that it still is now.
Doesn't the government consider this proposal a bit ...ridiculous?
Demand for high-capacity storage is no longer as strongly correlated to piracy as it was in the early 00's. You can for example download 1080p episodes of TV series from itunes that'll eat hard drive space in no time.
So can I claim my storage tax back if I fill a hard drive with legit content?
That means a 2TB device will in fact pile on €51.2 in taxes alone (2.5 cents times 2048GB).
Since when do manufacturers of hard drives use Base 2 to describe the size of their hard drives?
They don't, so it should be 50 € (2.5 cent times 2000 GB).
This initiative might be dropped, but i'm sure someone is working on the next one, and in the case, this will be also dropped, another one, until they get it.
During the middle age, people paid one tenth of their goods to their feudal sir, nowdays we pay muuuuch more that then
Incorrect in summary and article.
I can understand that taxes might be aggravating, but was this summary written by a third grader? I'm pretty sure submitter meant aggregated (or more likely aggregate).
(He/she also meant affect.)
Lobby a bill that makes it illegal for ordinary citizens to buy their own storage, and require everyone to use a cloud server that is "government approved". Then regularly check said cloud server for "illegal content" (government will try to just say this is CP they are looking for at first), and then royally screwing you over if they find something.
After years of not using a signature, I am going to make one to say the following: Fuck Beta
Hey, the summary is missing the important keywords "...in an attempt to protect copyright holders." (as seen in the linked story)
The price for a 2TB hard drive should only be $50, not $51.20 (sorry, don't have the euro symbol), since the size of drives have never been listed in base 2.
As for the topic at hand, that seems really crazy. That's about half the price of the hard drive in taxes alone.
What we need is a politician tax.
especially from nations who are political/economic fascists, and nations that abuse people in state owned sweatshops, globalism was a race to the bottom that pitted the nations with the worst human rights abuses against the middle/working classes who lost jobs due to multinational corporations deporting manufacturing jobs to nations willing to turn their citizens in to slaves,
occupy wallstreet
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
the government has considered taxing SMSs by 0.02€ each. (This is not a joke)
I hope this tax will also apply to people renting out cloud storage or it will just mean more money leaving the country for them.
Just one more tax and I'm sure all of the country's money problems will be solved. Just ONE more... Honest!
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Here in Hungary we already have a $0.5/GB tax on any device with a flash storage inside (pendrives, mp3 players, phones, even ssd). External hard drives "only" taxed $10/TB.
...on EVERYITHING from audio and vhs tapes(2012!) to hdds in set top boxes.
Some numbers:
24 cents on a dvd, 60 for a dual layer. Because of this, everyone buys DVDs in another COUNTRY - Slovakia
1,6 € on a 4 gig SD/MMC/etc card, 11 € on a 32 gig
1,3 € on a 4 gig pen drive or external ssd, 8€ on a gig
External HDDs up to 15€. Before the HDD price boom this was some 13% of the retail price for a 2T drive.
Portable music players: 10 € on a 4G, 26 € from 40-80G
Mobile phones with storage: up to 24€, 8G is 'only' 11€
Non-portable devices with built in storage (set-top boxes, etc.): up to 20€
(side note: ...but all is good since in exchange we have nice neighboring rights that allow downloading any movies and music LEGALLY from the internet, even from an illegal source. It is illegal to upload though, so no torrenting if you want to play nice. Most providers do throttle torrent traffic, and pay-ftp sites are taken down occasionally. Nobody cares (yet) about usenet. Most non-it people I know would pay for streaming services but there are NO providers. Some cable companies provide sh*tty VOD with 3 movies/genre...)
Apple Store prices for the iPhone 4S 64GB is $849 in the US, and €849 in Europe[EU] (Portugese[PT] price, iPhone is a little cheaper in some countries). Current $/€ convertion rate is 1$=0,76€, so the US price in € is: €645,44.
US prices do not include VAT wherease EU-an prices do, and PT-ese VAT is at 23%, meaning the iPhone 4S 64GB costs €690,24 w/o VAT; conclusion: PT-ese iPhone already support a €44,80 ($58,95) Apple taxes...
For Luxembourg[LU] (where VAT is a 15% tax), the Apple Store displayed price for that same iPhone is a little more interessing: €835,42 w/ VAT, but VAT excluded it costs more than in PT: €726,45 w/o VAT. Hence the Apple tax in LU is even bigger than in PT: €81,01 ($106,59) !
I've seen several comments saying that this is "old news", and others ditching this as a "Portuguese problem".
Two notes on this:
1) Yes, the Socialist Party Law Project was withdrawn, but it was with the promise of a comeback with "changes needed to avoid the worries several parties arose". Of course, nothing is solved, and the (cosmetic) changes aren't sufficient to change the fact that the Law Project is absurd. On the other hand, the Social Democratic party - now part of the Government - has the promise to introduce such a law during this month. Summing up, Portugal is far from getting rid of this nonsense, on the contrary.
2) This exact same insanity is comming to Europe, as an update to the 2001 EU Directive. After years of conversations and consultations around the topic, EU decided to put this matter into the hands of António Vitorino, which decided to throw away all the work done so far and start from scratch... with a twist: he has already made his mind about the need of a levy. You can read more about this, and *act*, here: http://ec.europa.eu/commission_2010-2014/barnier/headlines/speeches/2012/04/20120402_en.htm
640GB * 0.2€/GB = 128€
1TB * 0.2€/GB = 200€
This is pathetically retarded.
Good, they should put a tax on shelves too. People put stolen goods on shelves as well. Hit 'em where it hurts.
Waiting for you by the bridge
If they want to price storage out of the hands of the end users and thus cripple themselves then more power to them.
A tax like that is not going to do a damn thing for them because people won't be able to afford them and will either do without (and we get to read many MANY articles about how their aging tech running their government goes "tits up" on them) causing the government to not get any money or they find ways to smuggle the hard drives in on the black market also denying the government their tax money.
Either way this will be of vast amusement to us here on /.
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
We've had enough being fucked, thank you. Please go fuck yourself.
It's just so amusing to watch the politicians sweat when they cannot simply print the money they need - they either need to cut their expenditures or ask their voters to pay more. I'm loving it!
If you are going create an arbitrary tax on the size of something that affects an arbitrary section of the population why not create a penis size tax. It could be entirely self declared with no verification. The results should be made available on a public register, listed in order of length x girth. I'm sure that would raise a fortune.
No, a tax on idiotic laws. Every time someone proposes a law that will be nixed by the supreme/constitutional court because it violates other laws, tax the idiot who wasted valuable parliament time to get a moment in the limelight.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Apple might actually benefit. Sure, it'll make the iPhone more expensive... but the iPhone is already a premium, very expensive product. Proportionally their lower-priced competitors would be affected far worse.
Why pretend you're taxing businesses with a tax on technology? Just tax the businesses. Tax the things that most depend on government operations and expenses to work properly. Tax the things that actually make money that can be collected. Tax the things that cause sudden public expenses that must be bailed out.
Just put a sales tax on everything except necessities (used/homemade clothing, raw food, the cheapest 20% of shelter in each postal code and their utilities, minimum healthcare cost, public education, public transit). Then make this year's budget spend only whatever was collected last year, issuing debt only on specific budgets not paid by the cash flow (and requiring a special leglislative session passing 75% in 2 votes, followed the next year by a general election).
And tax the goddamn churches already. And stop paying the monarchy and their rich relatives - tax them the most. Those businesses have totally failed for centuries.
--
make install -not war
Something like this is already in Finland.
The rates in Finland are somewhat lower than those proposed for Portugal. Moreover, elsewhere on that site they say what consumers get in return: "Everyone is allowed to copy published works, such as music, movies, television and radio broadcasts for their own private use in Finland."
It is also quite clear that the compensation allows copying of movies and music on disks borrowed from libraries and suchlike. No doubt, the RIAA and MPAA would be a little queasy at such provisions in larger markets.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
See the efficacy of taxes is where you gouge something that most people can't or don't want to do without like gasoline, alcohol, tobacco. Cell phones are ubiquitous to the point where even the UN considers them a basic human right. So naturally the plan must be to gouge and gouge and gouge some more. Double, triple, quadruple the cost of handsets and data transmission.
Yeah, about 8 movies, or 2 or 3 major games, or 15 cd's. Give or take. Let's see, a 2TB drive holds about... 380 HD movies (@ 4.7GiB/ea)? 1285 SD movies (@ 1.4GiB/ea). If we are talking math, still seems kinda obvious. Most reason season of House on DVD - $44 - so... 3 seasons of a current show makes up for the change in price difference. * Used 1800GB in my maths, to represent realistically usable space on a 2TB drive.
No, a tax on idiotic laws. Every time someone proposes a law that will be nixed by the supreme/constitutional court because it violates other laws, tax the idiot who wasted valuable parliament time to get a moment in the limelight.
Hell with that. I want a "three strikes and you're a despot" law. If you voted "Aye" to violate my constitutional rights with some stupid law, and the supreme court overturns that legislation, and you've done this three times, you are guilty of being a serial tyrant and should be sentenced to not less than 10 years in a federal prison. That applies to everyone who voted for the law, not just the guy who signs it (although it could certainly start with him, as he took an oath to defend the Constitution when he entered office.)
No statute of limitations, either. You could be sleeping in your bed 10 years after leaving office, and if the Supreme Court overturns your 15-year-old crappy law, the ninjas bash down your door, haul you out of the arms of your mistress, and drag your butt to jail. None of these last minute help-my-buddy-in-the-industry-laws like pardons happening on the last days of office.
Congressional sessions would be over pretty damn quick, don't you think? Some idiot puts up a law written by lobbyists for the industry, and every other person in congress would immediately say "Um, I vote NO, right now. Who wants to go get a drink with me?"
John
Even though this proposal seems to have been shelved (for now?), it is still a silly move in the context of the EU's Common Market. Here in Germany, there's a similar tax on blank media, but you can always buy them blank-media-tax-free from Luxemburg and other EU countries that don't have this extra tax. And it is perfectly legal to do so too, because EU laws trump local laws (more precisely, EU laws as imported in national laws have higher precedence over other national laws).
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Damn, this is the best bloody proposal I've seen in years. Too bad it's likely to be unconstitutional...
If we had a supreme court which weren't a bunch of right wing nut jobs you might have a point, but I'd like my elected officials to go against the wishes of the douche bags who gave us the Citizens United decision.
0.01€ for each day of breathing air.
That would solve both the financial and poverty problems! All European countries would be rich and all poor citizens would suffocate to death. Brilliant.
5 cents times 2048GB
Wrong!
HDD capacity is not an exponential of 2, like a DDR module is. It is a multiple of the sectors/track * 512 bytes. So HDD manufacturers use GB to mean 1,000,000,000 bytes, with rounding up.
This is why the measurement 1 GiB is recommended for the 1,073,741,824 bytes (1024 MiB) available on a DDR module.
What is with all these bastards freeloading on the backs of others?
Their mindset: "Oh, you have something popular? Here, let us tax it, so we can get in on some of that money."
I am John Hurt.
Do you have a war on moths in Portugal? It may be more effective than a war on caterpillers
OLD, law was abandoned.
Absolutely insane proposal, I know it's supposedly being "reworked" but it shouldn't be, it should have been laughed out of existence the moment some socialist airhead shared it with anyone.
I just voted for a Massachusetts proposal for a constitutional amendment during our annual Town Meeting that would restore the First Amendment rights of citizens that Citizens United v.FEC has eroded. Too bad it will take a decade or two....
It's a shibiload.
Drives are done in powers of 10 rather than in powers of 2 which is what they should be...
a 2TB drive is only about 1.81TiB (exabinary) of actual storage after formatting.
as someone else said: "Not that we'd ever check submissions for accuracy here" :)
...NOT. Even JFK knew better than that (he cut taxes... something his party doesn't like to talk about).
I understand why the Citizens United decision is unpopular, but please explain why it was legally incorrect. Where in the constitution is the federal government granted the authority to restrict to whom and how much corporations can give money?
If you do not like the law, urge your representatives to change the constitution, do not ask the court to ignore it.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
How is 64G time .2 per G = 32?
Am I missing something? I mean i can see how it would be if it were 64G * .5 = 32
Someone needs to go back to elementary school math.
When drive fails do you get a refund??
How much per dead nigger?
Meanwhile, Lisbon is sitting on $19 BILLION (â14.5 billion) worth of gold reserves, most of it still left over from the good old days of plundering South America...
It's called Bribery.. Look it up.
When a citizen donates 3 bucks to a campaign (As Mr. Pres has been asking for daily in e-mail glips) no one expects the recipient to bend an ear.
When a corporate citizen (corporate citizenship should be abolished btw) donates 3 million bucks, the corporation expects the recipient to bend over.
There's your difference. And yes, bribery is the correct law in this case.
This would be a great idea if it were always easy to tell whether a law is constitutional or not. But it sure isn't for me, and I study constitutional law! So if your goal is literally zero legislation and zero legal innovation, this is a great idea. But no sane person should want either of those things. And here's a bonus: in the ensuing absence of legislation, we will have less and less guidance moving forward about what is actually constitutionally permissible, so the problem will only get worse over time. Yay? (The ACA, for example: I'm pretty convinced it's constitutional, but will the Supreme Court say it is? I have no idea!)
You're probably thinking "this is stupid: just read the constitution and it will tell you what's constitutional!" To which I reply: good luck. The Constitution is great, I make my livelihood studying it, but damn is it vague.
This does, though, reming me of something. Supposedly, when Rousseau was getting on in years he was asked for his views about how best to set up the polish government. Among his many other clever ideas, he proposed that the legislature rule by consensus. Anyone who blocked a measure would, in ten years, face trial to determine whether he should be celebrated as a national hero, or put immediately to death. I take it this would do the opposite of the effect you have in mind, but it's just as good an idea. You're in good company, at least! (http://www.constitution.org/jjr/poland.htm)
caritj.org
The federal government has laws against bribery of federal judges, inspectors, law enforcement agents, the list goes on and on. Those laws are not remotely controversial, and constitutional challenges to them would be laughed out of court. Why should Senators/Reps get special dispensation to accept bribes, or corporations special dispensation to bribe them, when it's prohibited for every other type of federal official with no trouble at all?
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Easy. Congress, in Article I, has the power to make regulations for the election of Senators and Representatives. So there's the source of Constitutional power. Next, of course, we ask whether McCain-Feingold violated the First Amendment. We had some precedent already on the books to the effect that corporations were First Amendment speakers and that spending was speech. Fair enough (although remember that it's not clear at all that the text of the constitution actually requires either of these results). Then the question is: is the regulation narrowly tailored to advance a compelling government interest? I think the answer is clearly yes, and we're seeing in the current election cycle why: in the absence of some sort of limit on election spending, fundraising capacity becomes functionally disconnected from popular support, allowing the candidate who has the richer supporters to more easily outlast and out advertise every other candidate until he eventually wins and everyone else is out of money. Today we call this man "Mitt Romney."
caritj.org
Let's just have a universal breathing tax. To make it fair, all inhalations are free! Exhalations, however, will be taxed according to volume.
Bribes can be disguised as campaign contributions, but campaign contributions are not necessarily bribes.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Don't give them fuckers any clever ideas.
What is the legal precedent for money being speech?
That decision also had the double whammy of not only declaring money as speech, but that political contributions couldn't be limited by law nor made public because making that could result in retribution against the contributors.
That was an immense twist of illogic.
The ONLY part of a democratic process that should be anonymous is the vote itself, because there everyone, from the poorest to the richest, hold the exact same power over their representatives. Contributions, especially large amounts by non-persons with lots of aggregate cash (businesses, churches, unions, etc) should not be allowed to be anonymous because it massively skews the democratic process in favour of those with more money.
Free speech is not the same as anonymous speech. Free speech specifically prevents *government* and its agents from acting against someone for speaking about something, but does not protect against consequences (including peaceful retaliation) by private citizens.
Take the recent example of Rush Limbaugh, whining about how his free speech rights were being trampled by leftist activists after his misogynist comments. Did government step in to punish him? No--some did call for action by the FCC, but I'm glad they didn't do anything (AFAIK). What the people did was flood Limbaugh's sponsors demanding they pull their ads or they'd be boycotted, and as private businesses (i.e. not government-owned) that's exactly what happened. Guess what Rush, you're a hypocrite for trying to invoke the sacred cow when other private citizens exercise *their* 1st amendment rights against you.
I'd point out that US lawmakers and courts have had no problem trampling all over the 1st Amendment and other parts of the constitution the last decade when it comes to private citizens (free speech zones, for example), but the obvious rebuttal is that two wrongs don't make a right.
... and ignorant politicians are (at least Portuguese ones).
This tax was to be applied on EVERY digital storage device, phones, printers, etc., that is, everything digital.
I, as a proud Portuguese and amateur photographer, would have to pay this tax on every memory card I use for my digital camera and for every sheet of paper I printed MY OWN photos on. Meaning, I would have to pay for my hobbies and not receive a cent.
More, I've not seen mentioned here that most REAL artist were against this proposal, the most known of them was Zé Pedro, guitarist of Xutos e Pontapés.
This proposal would tax every digital storage device on the assumption that it would be used for private copies and most of the times, many storage devices are used for original works' storage...
Who in the world used its mobile phone to store copied materials (the full storage capacity, I mean)?!
But this tax, doesn't seem very useful and would only lead to more suffering.
If you raise the cost of data storage, then companies will have to raise their costs to their customers. Customers will buy from countries which data is cheaper. Taxed country will loose jobs, to those other countries.
Here in America, we tend to put taxes on Sin Tax (for items we really don't need or are overall negative to our well being, Cigaretts, Gas, etc...). But Cheap Storage seems to benefit most everyone. Why Tax it?
I am actually a political moderate. I see the need for government services that support a greater good that is unprofitable by private industry, and I see the need to make sure government doesn't get to big and start taxing us for things we really don't need, or is too expensive then it really is worth.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
First point: this didn't pass into law, after active online campaigning; the law was shelved, will be revised, and may (probably will) be resubmited for approval in the future.
Second point: this wasn't a "pure" tax. This is a compensation scheme to pay back artists for "lost revenue" due to the private copy law. The private copy law (already in effect), allows citizens to copy artist work for private use. Putting an example into it, ripping a CD I own and copying the mp3 onto my ipod is perfectly legal, under the private copy law. Artists somehow believe I would buy the same art twice (once on CD and again on mp3), so they cry out for compensation. In fact, a compensation scheme already exists (on the old private copy law), which levies blank media (tapes, CD-Rs), but it did not include hard disks and solid state storage. This law meant to update the old compensation scheme. It's stupid, designed by someone who doesn't know Moore law, and was rightfully bashed in public.
I just hope it doesn't reappear in camouflage. Or whenever people are distracted by something else. The law is stupid beyond belief.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
Sounds like a great way to ensure that no new data centers are built in Portugal!
hey!
So I guess we can expect to see a booming black market in hard drives pretty soon.
Liberty in your lifetime
That will solve all your economic problems. Good Luck with that!
There's no "corporate exemption" is the thing. Corporations are made of people. Whether I give a senator $1 million as a citizen, or as a representative of a company, I'm going to have some objective in mind. And you do know the money can't go directly to the senator, right? It goes to his election campaign, and for the most part congresscritters are honest in that regard.
The fundamental problem is TV advertising. There's a fixed amount of ad slots, so there's effectively an auction for reaching the viewer, and whoever can win the auction gets the eyeballs. This means there's an unlimited demand for election campaign funds.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The fundamental problem is that you have this stupid idea that without campaign funding at this level, there would be no politicians.....
Good-bye
It's called Auvibel in Belgium and it's a levy on all media.
Here's a list of the tariffs: http://www.auvibel.be/en/remuneration/tariffs
The law was created after a European directive, which was probably also the reason they made this law in Portugal.
http://www.auvibel.be/userfiles/files/2001-29-EGen.pdf
> a 64GB iPhone could be €32 more expensive. From the article: 'The proposal would have consumers paying an extra €0.2 per gigabyte in tax,
Am I nuts or is the summary's math wrong? Either the tax rate is €0.5 or the additional tax on a 64GB device would be €12.80.
Mitt Romney doesn't need donations for his campain. Even before this ruling he was free to spend his own money on his campain. You can't claim Mitt Romney is bribing himself. He does fund raising because there are stupid people willing to give him money he doesn't need.
... to piss off the geeks?
100% tax of your income money will go to the government if you are a politician. Problem solved.
Can't wait for the 60TB drives to come out in 3-4 years. 500 MSRP + 1500 taxes
We have the same here in France, for years, with average success.
Every couple of years, the administration has to completely adjust those taxes because of the market evolution (new category of devices : think smartphone, tablet, NAS, digical video recorder, hard drive based TV recorder, internet-modem-with-nas-but-only-for-catchup-tv, etc) and the technological improvements (DVD, blueray, SSD, hybrid storage, cloud, etc). Basically, it is a mess and nobody is happy : the entertainment industry says it gets not enough money from it, the citizen are against it, ISP say that content is none of their business, companies pay for taxes that don't concern them, etc.
The final result is that the money doesn't go to the right persons, the average customers are taxed, and all the rest are buying their hardware in other European countries where the products are not burdened with those taxes.
Not to be obtuse, but what section in Article 1 gives them this power?
Maybe section 4?
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Place of Choosing Senators.
Is the "election" limited to just running election day or does it apply to all activities engaged in by the candidate seeking election? If it extends beyond the basic how to run an election and count votes what limits does it have?
Corporations are not people. They are a legal construct to shield people from the legal consequences of their actions.
They are therefore not "morally aware" and specifically created to avoid such "moral awareness". Therefore they can have no moral rights.
They are a work of legal fiction and should be treated as such.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
WRONG. If you increase business costs, businesses will have to increase prices, layoff workers, decrease pay, decrease R&D, etc. Economic intervention impacts the entire economy.
According to SI, 2TB = 2000GB. And that's what disk manufacturers used, and have always used.
2TiB = 2048GiB, but that's a different thing, and disk manufacturers don't care about that.
It's legally incorrect because corporations are not people. The constitution doesn't make them people, nor does it grant them any kind of rights, the employees and owners of a corporation and they have rights to speech, but the corporation itself does not.
Personally I also believe that while campaign finance can be argued to be speech the constitution doesn't grant you any sort of guarantee that because you have more money to give you get to speak louder, any more than having a loud voice guarantees you the right to scream at midnight.
Aside from that, the current court has very little integrity and ignores the constitution or not on pretty much a whim. All indications are that the court will find the health care mandate unconstitutional, but when it came to medical marijuana the same court allowed the feds to use interstate commerce to override state laws. The Roberts court is partisan, it is more activist than any liberal court has ever been, and it inconsistently applies the constitution to support its political beliefs. The court has become a farce with no accountability to even the ethics rules they apply to other judges. I don't know what the fix is, but at present I'll not put their word to determine who is a tyrant.
In actuality we call this man "Newt Gingrich", Romney would still be where he is without Citizens United.
I definitely agree with what you are saying. However, things are simpler in Europe with your VAT.
In the US, we have a patchwork of sales taxes that are are state, locality and even "occupation" based. Furthermore, at least in my state, it's illegal for a vendor to advertise prices including tax, unless the vendor is selling goods/services from a very short, explicitly-defined list (examples include gasoline and cinema tickets). I guess the idea is so that consumers will know they paid the sales tax, because it is required to be a separate line item on the receipt.
By way of example, here's what the breakdown on the charges for prepared food in my locality: $X menu price * 1.025% "restaurant occupation tax" * (1 + (.055 state sales tax + 0.015 "local option" sales tax)). Note that as a consequence of this formula, the restaurant tax ends up being taxed in itself... yes, sometimes we have to pay taxes on our taxes.
The reason the situation evolved this way is that each state is allowed to decide how much sales tax to charge (or whether to charge any at all!). It's not a nationally-set thing. Then, each state can decide whether to allow cities to tack on additional sales tax. For example, in my state, the state law allows cities to tack on 0%, 0.5%, 1.0%, or 1.5% based on what the city populace/government decide (yes, it has to be one of those four options). So, even within the same state, sales tax varies from 5.5% to 7.0%. It's strange, because driving just a mile out of town can drop the sales tax rate by 1.5%.
The "occupation tax" for specific industries (eg. hotels, telephony service, restaurants, etc in my city) is a backdoor/loophole that my city uses to transcend the state limits on local sales tax options. An "occupation tax" is not the same as a "sales tax", even though the effect on purchase price is almost exactly the same—except occupation tax gets meta-taxed as I described above.
Fun, eh? Municipalities want to raise revenue, and if they can't use sales tax then often their only choice is to jack up property tax rates. Not every state allows cities to charge income tax. So, as insane as this all is, it's not like we are doing it for the lulz.
How do European cities raise revenue? Do they have to lobby for VAT-turnback (ie. "y% of VAT raised in your municipal area will be given to your city budget")? Or is it all property tax-based? Or are you assessed city-based income tax in some cases?
External drives or “multimedia drives” as the proposed bill calls them, in capacities greater than 1TB, can be taxed to the tune of 5 cents per gigabyte, so in theory, a 2TB drive would cost an additional €103.2 per unit (5 cents times 2048GB).
5 cents times 2048GB is €102.4.
But most hard disk manufacturers would say a 2TB drive is 2000GB, so that would "only" be €100.0 extra per unit.
This sounded like the Stamp Tax that was imposed on the American colony.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stamp_Act_1765
Combining it with warrant less search and wire tapping, history is sure repeating itself...
Didn't stop Congress lately, so why should it now?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That's why a politician should have to publish any and all donations. And not only to him directly, but also to every organization he controls or has a sizable share in, as well as monitoring which corporation's board he joins after his term is over.
Bribery is handled like some kind of petty crime instead of what it really is: High treason. Yes, treason. You are taking money from someone to betray your sovereign, who bestowed much power to you to work for the good of the country. It fits the bill.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Corporations are not people. Corporations are made of people. People do not lose their 1st Amendment freedoms when acting on behalf of a corporation. People do not lose their rights peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances when that "assembly" is a corporation. Yes, a corporation is a legal fiction, but an assembly of people must be able to engage in political speech for democracy to function, regardless of the fiction they assemble under.
I can rightfully spend my own money for any political advocacy I want to. Joining with like-minded people to do so doesn't change those rights.
There are no "evil corporations", there are only evil people.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If the money goes to the MAFIAA, I consider that payment in advance for all the copyrighted content I can fit on it.
It wouldn't make it to the artists.
Even if the law says it does, the labels will use creative accounting to keep the artists from finding out what they are owed. We had a big government investigation about that here a while back, and it turned out artists were owed millions.
Eliot Spitzer may be a corrupt, unethical, power-hungry liberal, but he did accomplish a few good things as New York's AG.
"a 2TB drive would cost an additional €103.2 per unit (5 cents times 2048GB)." A 2TB drive does not store 2048GB, it stores 2,000,000,000,000 bytes, rounded up to the nearest cylinder. For the past 15-20 years, hard drive manufacturers have been inflating their drive capacities by using "decimal kilobytes/megabytes" etc., so that 1KB = 1,000 bytes, 1MB = 1,000,000 bytes, 1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes, 1TB = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. (Try to do that with RAM, I dare you! If your 1GB memory DIMM had 1,000,000,000 bytes, your PC wouldn't even boot!)
To make it clear, this is a tax on the *private copying* of the copyrighted works purchased.
"PROJECTO DE LEI N.o 118/XII
“Aprova o regime jurídico da Cópia Privada e altera o artigo 47.o do Código do
Direito de Autor e dos Direitos Conexos – Sétima alteração ao Decreto-Lei n.o
63/85, de 14 de Março"
This proposal is to update the current legislation in place on copyright. It's an attempt to reinforce it to compensate authors for the legal private copying that occurs of purchased copyrighted works. It has nothing to do with piracy!
IMO the spirit of this this it to put piracy and private copy at the same level; after all the copyright holders are not compensated for these copies, be they private/legal or illegal!
It is appalling that our legislators (I'm Portuguese) can come up with this sort of proposals - as if an 1 TB drive will always hold 1 TB of copied copyrighted works; as if I should keep paying for works I purchased and/or others purchased!
Also, IIRC, the money collected by this tax is to be managed by an external entity, not the government, and distributed to authors - I have yet to see how this has been done in the past and where the money has landed.
If you want to know more, and are able to understand Portuguese, search "118/XII".
...(talking from the field, Greece)...
so, all the cause why there is now trouble is, because nobody was taxing our terabytes?
And just that, would have saved us? Who knew there was such a digital metropolis to milk on!
And, why nobody thought earlier of taxing wax tablets, marble, skin, paper?
Meanwhile, the untaxable financial sector which runs at 70 times the real economy,
is surely a sacred one, and always first to be saved with taxpayer's money!
I know it's hard, and vague. The idea certainly is to make new legislation extremely difficult to pass, because if you look at laws passed in the last 50 years or so, I'd say most are horrible; and only a few were well-intentioned. They're the brainchildren of profiteers and religious extremists, and not representative of the people as a whole. So a "three strikes" law would essentially give an elected official the chance to safely vote on two meaningful things. Can you get 51 Senators and the President to agree that one of the two things they'll vote on in their life is your slightly shady bill? As a country, we probably really don't need that bit of legislation in the first place. This would just ensure it.
But yeah, it probably would make some things worse. My biggest problem with most of the legislation is with these midnight one-paragraph riders that we see hidden in the middle of the most critical bills. I want them stopped cold. Line Item vetoes didn't work, so let's try a different approach. Accountability.
Require a change control system be used to maintain a history of the text being written into each law. Then, let's say the Hospital Administrator Union's lobbyist writes the text of a law establishing their right to repossess organs from transplant clients who don't pay their bills. As a bought-and-paid-for congressman, you can copy and paste their full text into page 862 of the next omnibus budget bill. But as the change control law would require, anyone who wants can look at the history of the document and see that it was actually you who inserted that particular paragraph. You're not allowed anonymity behind a crowd of authors. You stand alone as the guy who wrote the most cruel legislation ever. You get to go home and explain to your district why you wrote that it's OK to let a repo man hunt down your grandpa and cut out his liver.
The congressmen can still have closed door meetings, and we don't have to know who originally proposed it, or who the hospital representative was that whispered in someone else's ear. But at the end of the meeting, someone will have to fess up to be the specific author of that legislative turd-in-the-punchbowl.
John
Taxes now are the lowest they have been since WW2. Economy is doing great, right?
Looking at the laws that have been passed lately, I can only say that yes, zero new laws seem like something very favorable...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...the profit made from this was supposed to revert directly into SPA (Portuguese RIAA/music mafia) to "benefit" SPA's artists.
The SPA itself published an article with a petition allegedly signed by its own artists defending this tax.
Sh*t hit the fan when some of these artists went public, saying they never signed any petition or were even informed that their names were included and asked their names to be removed from the SPA's petition.
No more talk about this ridiculous tax since then.
Hope this post gets modded/visible so that more people can have a better idea of what really happened.