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)."

Comments

Dear Portugal

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck You!

Re:Dear Portugal

[Anonymous Coward]

What we need is a politician tax.

Re:Dear Portugal

[daem0n1x]

We've had enough being fucked, thank you. Please go fuck yourself.

Re:Dear Portugal

[Opportunist]

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.

Re:Dear Portugal

[plover]

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?"

Re:Dear Portugal

[tao]

Damn, this is the best bloody proposal I've seen in years. Too bad it's likely to be unconstitutional...

Re:Dear Portugal

[Eskarel]

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.

Re:Dear Portugal

[syntheticmemory]

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....

Re:Dear Portugal

[characterZer0]

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.

Re:Dear Portugal

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Dear Portugal

[pdabbadabba]

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)

Re:Dear Portugal

[laughingcoyote]

Where in the constitution is the federal government granted the authority to restrict to whom and how much corporations can give money?

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?

Re:Dear Portugal

[pdabbadabba]

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."

Re:Dear Portugal

[characterZer0]

Bribes can be disguised as campaign contributions, but campaign contributions are not necessarily bribes.

Re:Dear Portugal

[quacking duck]

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.

Re:Dear Portugal

[lgw]

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.

Re:Dear Portugal

[spire3661]

The fundamental problem is that you have this stupid idea that without campaign funding at this level, there would be no politicians.....

Re:Dear Portugal

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Dear Portugal

[jedidiah]

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.

Re:Dear Portugal

[Eskarel]

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.

Re:Dear Portugal

[Eskarel]

In actuality we call this man "Newt Gingrich", Romney would still be where he is without Citizens United.

Re:Dear Portugal

[Opportunist]

Didn't stop Congress lately, so why should it now?

Re:Dear Portugal

[Opportunist]

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.

Re:Dear Portugal

[lgw]

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.

Re:Dear Portugal

[plover]

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.

Re:Dear Portugal

[Opportunist]

Looking at the laws that have been passed lately, I can only say that yes, zero new laws seem like something very favorable...

€0.2 = €0,02?

[Anonymous Coward]

carry on.

Re:€0.2 = €0,02?

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously missed the 'introduction of the euro'-event.

Re:€0.2 = €0,02?

[trnk]

It's Verizon Math! €0.2 per GB would be €1 for every 5GB (€200 TB). Not that we ever check submissions here on /.

Re:€0.2 = €0,02?

[Anonymous Coward]

Never mind that, how is 64 gigabytes at €0.2 per gigabyte €32? The submitter is failing primary school maths...

Re:€0.2 = €0,02?

[JazzLad]

That's ok, he also isn't aware that HDD mfgrs use the 1000 instead of the 1024 way of counting. He's wrong all over the place & /. "editors" are too busy creating things like /. TV.

Re:€0.2 = €0,02?

[joaommp]

The truth is that the tax per gigabyte for cell phones will be different from the tax per gigabyte for memory cards which, in turn, will also be different from the tax per gigabyte for hard drives. It will be 0.02 euro for hard drives but, for cellphones, it will actually be 0.50 euro (really, 50 cents) per gigabyte.

Re:€0.2 = €0,02?

[AlienIntelligence]

That's ok, he also isn't aware that HDD mfgrs use the 1000 instead of the 1024 way of counting. He's wrong all over the place & /. "editors" are too busy creating things like /. TV.

And coming up with the next Slashvertisements.

-AI

Spain, Italy and Greece

[Taco Cowboy]

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

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[Lord_Breetai]

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

I guess that leaves the byte tax for Ireland.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[Taco Cowboy]

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

I guess that leaves the byte tax for Ireland.

It's more like "Tax Bites" for the Irish :)

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[Anonymous Coward]

Italy already has it, on the assumption that storage will be used for copyrighted material. When the tax was introduced, some places like the Apple store showed the corresponding amount in red for affected products. Now the situation is more complicated so they just say that a 199 euro iPod pays 41 euro to the state for various taxes.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, in Italy we have had a tax on storage for quite a long time, meant as a (believe it or not) compensation for the artists whose work is pirated. In reality it probably goes to SIAE and not to the artists. I remember that when the tac came to be it almost doubled the price of CD-R and CD+R. It's not as heavy as the proposed tax in Portugal, though.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[SuricouRaven]

Canada too. Not sure about the US and UK, but wouldn't surprise me. Not as heavy, but the same idea: Tax all storage and media players on the assumption that they'll be used to infringe, and give the money to any major copyright holder with enough political clout to get a share. Independant artists obviously get screwed because it'd be impractical to administer.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[daem0n1x]

I guess that leaves the byte tax for Ireland.

No problem. But if they create a litre tax in Ireland there will be a civil war!

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[ByOhTek]

The US doesn't have a storage quantity tax.

Honestly, such a tax is retarded, especially with the way storage increases (~1000x every 10-12 years?), you'd have to readjust the rates almost yearly. Anyway, you typically tax based on the prices of what is charged for purchasing/selling something - so, why not just put a % tax on storage devices, rather than a tax on the absolute amount of space.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[Anonymous Coward]

Italy has already had this since 2010. No one can beat us on taxes. Any other country is purely at an amatorial level. We do not have it only on pure storage, but also on items containing storage, like phones.

And since we are the real masters of futile taxation, the earnings do not even go to the state, to fund the deficit or to support welfare. The earnings go to support the music industry.

See http://www.tecnophone.it/2010/03/18/la-nuova-tassa-s-i-a-e-in-vigore-dal-23-marzo-2010-su-cellulari-e-apparecchi-informatici/

Google translate can probably be your friend here.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[Anonymous Coward]

Canada too. Not sure about the US and UK, but wouldn't surprise me. Not as heavy, but the same idea: Tax all storage and media players on the assumption that they'll be used to infringe, and give the money to any major copyright holder with enough political clout to get a share. Independant artists obviously get screwed because it'd be impractical to administer.

Pretty sure Germany & Austria have it too.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[Anonymous Coward]

That would seem to be the idea: a tax that rises with automatic inflation following Moore's Law, doubling every frew years, could make politicians look friendly for reducing it every few years. And I could actually see it: the infrastructure for bulky storage, in electricity and cooling costs, are quite high, and many businesses do not use it at all wisely.

Unfortunately, I'm afraid it would be lobbied out of existence very quickly. And some of the most abusive data hoarding groups, namely the government themselves, would not be taxable.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[mikechant]

Nothing like this in the UK. Nothing currently proposed AFAIK.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[DrXym]

I think it's a perfectly reasonable thing to tax assuming it legally gets copyright holders off the backs of users. If users are still liable for prosecution then I really don't see it justifiable at all.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[agw]

Canada too. Not sure about the US and UK, but wouldn't surprise me. Not as heavy, but the same idea: Tax all storage and media players on the assumption that they'll be used to infringe, and give the money to any major copyright holder with enough political clout to get a share. Independant artists obviously get screwed because it'd be impractical to administer.

Pretty sure Germany & Austria have it too.

Of course they have. On anything that might allow copyright infringement (yes, printers, scanners, etc.). It's not a real tax, though, as it's unavailable to the government to use it for other stuff.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[Sam Andreas]

That's incorrect, Canada does not have this tax on storage devices or media players.

The copyright lobby has tried and failed a few times to have the copyright levy extended from blank media. As of right now the levy is only on blank cd's. http://www.cpcc.ca/en/the-cpcc/private-copying-tariff

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[rossdee]

The Irish already have a civil war, its protestants vs catholics and it has been going on for centuries

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[Sam Andreas]

The unreasonable part is that you're putting a tax on something that is ridiculously changeable. Right now 1 Terabyte seems a lot, so to pay an extra few euro for a hard drive seems ok.

In 2002 the Canadian copyright lobby proposed a levy of 0.8 per megabyte on removable flash media and 2.1 per megabyte on non-removable storage in an audio player (in addition to the existing levy on blank audio tapes / cd's).

That means that the 16GB SD card I bought recently for my camera would have cost not $10 but $141 and a 32GB media player would be an extra $688.

Those sizes were unheard of in 2002 but only ten years later are commonplace. In another ten years, a gigabyte tax will probably be just as absurd.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[SuricouRaven]

Doesn't that just make it even worse? It can't even be argued that the money is going to the public good. It's nothing but the most blatant of corruption: Take from everyone, and hand it straight over to a few companies that had the political influence to get laws made in their favor.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[BoRegardless]

Byte my a--. if this won't create war. This steps on everyone's toes.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[mhajicek]

Would data compression be considered tax evasion?

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[CapOblivious2010]

But no mention was made of using the money to pay artists or record labels or whatever - the summary at least says they want to avoid becoming the next greece, so it sounds like just another tax to help fund various govt operations. In that case I can't see that it changes the copyright/liability situation at all.

However, at 103 euro for a 2TB drive, that's pretty close to a 100% tax, and Moore's law says the tax rate will double every 18 months. Yikes! (yes, I know Moore's law applies to transistors, not spinning rust, but the effect is similar)

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[syntheticmemory]

Still cheaper than printing out all that data. I'm sure Apple would love to make a product that would OCR tunes from a paper print out and play them.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The US doesn't have a storage quantity tax.

There is one obscure and largely irrelevant semi-exception: CD-R disks come in two flavors 'Data' and 'Music'. The latter are priced with the you-worthless-filthy-pirate-scum markup, the former aren't.

This distinction is, uh, deeply relevant to all owners of "Consumer stand-alone Audio CD recorders". "Professional" ones are not affected. Much more importantly, computers are not affected and I'm pretty sure that "Consumer stand-alone Audio CD recorders" are approximately as rare as unicorns...

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[Sique]

No, Germany has a tax only on empty media, but not on HDs.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[Freddybear]

They have The Bite in Mexico (la Mordida).

http://www.mexicomatters.net/retirementmexico/04_bribeslamordidainmexico.php

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[Anonymous Coward]

And the bit tax for Poland.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[Sponge Bath]

I think it's a perfectly reasonable thing to tax assuming it legally gets copyright holders off the backs of users.

The amount of government favors given to large corporations should be tied to the amount of government regulation:

If you want total freedom to charge what you want, then no government granted monopolies (patents/copyright).
If you want government granted monopolies, then the government gets to set reasonable price limits and monopoly terms.
If you want government to collect your revenue through taxes, then you are barred from participating in private sales and government sets the price.

Take your pick, you are free to accept as little or as much government intervention as you choose.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[javascriptjunkie]

Maybe taxes are always arbitrary, but I don't see how a terabyte tax this late in the same wouldn't affect consumers. I guess it's yet another example of technically illiterate politicians passing stupid laws that they don't understand the ramifications of . If Portugal has any kind of technology industry, this is likely to drive it elsewhere in the EU.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[DrXym]

Taxes do not have to be set in stone. There is nothing to stop them enacting something which can be adjusted every year.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[afidel]

Actually the cost per GB has exceeded Moore's law, in 1980 the cost per GB for HDD storage was $1,000,000, thirty years later it was $.10 exceeding Moore's law by over 3 18 month cycles. citation.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[daem0n1x]

Wooooooosh!

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[Sir_Sri]

as with most taxes they are best as a percent of the value of something.

The problem with the music and video sort of taxes is that the idea was on 'how many songs could you typically load'. Even if that works out to a cost per megabyte it may still change with changing file formats and the correct observation that far more than just music is on a lot of these devices now.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[MightyYar]

Twibright Optar can squeeze 200kb per page, so Apple would only need to ship you 13 double-sided sheets of paper for a 5MB AAC.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[funwithBSD]

Greece will race right to the 2 bit tax.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[davros74]

While that's a very impressive trend for HDD storage, Moore's law is not applicable here. Moore's law only deals with the rate of doubling the number of transistors in an integrated circuit. HDD storage is not based on transistor density, but magnetic recording density. Now, Flash storage? That would be more closely tied to Moore's law I guess, but flash densities have not advanced as fast as magnetic media have. Flash also suffers from the more your shrink it, the more problems you run into (reliability, leakage, etc). At least with current flash technology, anyway. If reliability is a concern, you don't want cutting edge highest density or highest performance.

And the flood in Thailand has still left a huge "bump" in that $/GB curve for HDDs. Still waiting for it to "return to normal". *sigh*

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[MasaMuneCyrus]

Taxing storage under the assumption that you're going to use it for piracy is ridiculous. This is like police departments taxing car drivers for the miles they drive under the "reasonable" assumption that you're going to be using your car for reckless and/or drunk driving.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[Dinghy]

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

I guess that leaves the byte tax for Ireland.

It's more like "Tax Bites" for the Irish :)

A Tax Bites strategy could help combat obesity in America.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[lgw]

Well, companies are made of people, so this is a money transfer to the stockholders and employees of the company. It's still corruption, of course, but so is social security by that measure (yes, Warren Buffett gets a check from the government). Any transfer of money from the (some) taxpayers to (some) politically favored group is corruption, but most modern corruption hides behind "but we like the group who's getting the money, so it's OK".

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Trying to avoid becoming the "next Greece" by ensuring they become the next Greece.

Is there no human endeavor that can't be broken to the saddle of the masses' bread-and-circuses consumption?

"Sir, what good is electricity?"

"Senator, in 20 years, you'll be taxing it."

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[kurkosdr]

"And Greece? They'll have the honor of having the world's first Kilobyte Tax" I am a Greek, and I can say that this isn't as extreme as it sounds. We have the square meter tax (every square meter of real estate is taxed heavily in Greece, with 4 different taxes, I paid 200 euros for a 50 square meter house in a not-rich-by-not-bad neighbourhood, and I classify for only 1 of the 4 taxes, go figure), we have the 1euro per 1 litre of gasoline tax (yes, gasonline costs 1.84 euros per litre here), so, say, 1 cent per Kilobyte doesn't sound so extreme. What happens when a company goes bankrupt? It can't find investors and goes belly up. What happens when a nation goes bankrupt? It sucks the citizens dry, without even promising to give anything back, so when the inevitable happens, citizens are in an even worse shape compared to if the nation had gone belly up from day 1.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Belgium too. They even troll internet marketplaces, I got a mail from the bastards when trying to resell a foreign iPhone. This is why Belgium is also known locally as the Sicily of the North (no offense.)

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[ZorinLynx]

I've been a geek all my life, am 34 years old and have never even SEEN a "Consumer stand-alone Audio CD recorders", much less owned one. So yeah, about "as rare as unicorns" is probably quite accurate.

Who the heck ever bought or used these things anyway? From some basic research they seem fairly clunky; you have to record audio at 1X (realtime) from a source, like copying vinyl to tape back in the old days. On top of that, they had copy restrictions (SCMS) in place, and if you screwed up when recording, the screw-up was permanent. Sounds incredibly inconvenient compared to just burning a music CD from iTunes!

Not to mention paying more for media. These devices seem like a lose-lose-lose situation.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[r1348]

I beg to differ: as an Italian, I can tell you that we already have a storage tax called "equo compenso" that can't even boast the crisis as an excuse. Its income goes to the local copyright collecting society as "piracy compensation", regardless the purpose of the storage device.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[Anonymous Coward]

We'll test it on you limey's first. They call us obese.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[Anonymous Coward]

Not entirely true about the UK: way back in the 80s, a levy was imposed on cassettes, even the short 15 minute ones sold as "data" ones for home computers.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I've never seen one in person, to be sure. What I don't know is whether they were always a terrible idea, marketed on the theory that people wanted a 1-for-1 equivalent to the tape deck, only much more expensive and not re-writable, or whether they enjoyed a brief period of being reasonably sensible; back when CD burning on a computer only happened at slightly greater than 1x, buffer underruns were a serious consideration for those of us not cool enough to own SCSI gear, and having your OS die an awful death halfway through was actually a plausible consideration...

Given the existence of tape, which got good and cheap a fair while back, and minidisk, which was probably the most refined technology for real-time music recording in the field(Sony always was a hardass about doing anything useful with minidisks and computers; but a 'professional' minidisk unit would give you no SCMS and a choice of mic, line, or toslink, on cheap media for the time, if you wanted) followed by the transition to computers that were actually pretty good at burning disks, I'm assuming that very few ever entered the wild.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[zou258]

In France, this idiotic law was passed more than two years ago under the name "private copy tax". See
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copie_priv%C3%A9e
http://www.chere-copie-privee.org/ (sorry it's all in French)

    1Tb USB external HD -> tax=20euro
    100Gb USB stick -> tax=12.50euro

As a daddy who uses hard drives to store family camcorder vids, I strongly resent this.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[HornWumpus]

I actually knew a genius 10+ years ago. He _rented_ a 'Consumer stand-alone Audio CD recorder' and was happily pirating away.

I had to explain it to him twice, then we went to the store together to look at the price of spindles. He got it, but got pissed instead.

I heard he did get himself a computer later.

So my impression of 'Consumer stand-alone Audio CD recorders' is that you have to be as dumb as a rent-to-own customer to have ever wanted one.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[lsatenstein]

What will happen is that companies will buy disk arrays, consisting of a (terrabyte -1) bytes for tax avoidance. The electric bills will increase and the extra taxes will be avoided.

Re:Spain, Italy and Greece

[Coren22]

I have seen CD recorders, and a friend has a DVD recorder, they are less unusual in the computer illiterate market.

Killing off storage?

[SuricouRaven]

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.

Re:Killing off storage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Than I will only stream porn from online and not store it in my porn ware house?

I have better idea, letsrestrict the internet!

Re:Killing off storage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Today that might be logical but what about 10 years from now. And to expand, even today, if you're filling up TB drives of data you're probably aware that you can just buy multiple 1TB drives and have them side by side or in a raid array, does Portugal plan on taxing that technology, if so where does it stop before Portugal stifles their own innovation and advancement through uneducated, blind-sighted politics. Furthermore Portugal is not doing anything to my knowledge to subsidize virtual storage development or production so how do they think they have even the right to put their greedy hands in the cookie jar, not that having the right or not would stop them...

Re:Killing off storage?

[Grishnakh]

They have every right, just as they have the right to make any wacky law they choose.

However, "Portugal" and "innovation and advancement" shouldn't even be in the same sentence; when was the last time you heard about any kind of innovation or advancement from Portugal? When was the last time they led the world in anything? 1500? Portugal is about as relevant to advanced technology as Kazakhstan, Myanmar, or Zimbabwe.

Re:Killing off storage?

[FishTankX]

If i'm not mistaken, Portgual was on the bleeding edge of maritime tech and exploration back in the 1500s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_discoveries

Re:Killing off storage?

[HornWumpus]

They just need one more law change and they will own the copyright on the western hemisphere. (charts)

Outdated

[GothicKnight]

**OLD** This law draft was already discarted like 2 moths ago.

Re:Outdated

[ciderbrew]

Wrong (almost) - draft law dropped doesn't seem to matter. They come up with these ideas and keep pushing a tweaking them and pushing them and in a few years they are in place.
. So yes you are correct. "That FA" may be wrong or old; but it isn't dead - Got to keep the fight going.

Re:Outdated

[ChipMonk]

Which is why we must remain on guard against SOPA and PIPA. I'm already hearing rumblings from their supporters to try again.

"Draft law" is only one dropped letter away from "daft law".

Re:Outdated

[SeaFox]

...discarted like 2 moths ago.

So into the flame it went?

Re:Outdated

[ThatsNotPudding]

**OLD** This law draft was already discarted like 2 moths ago.

By Renee, attracted to a candle flame.

Re:Outdated

[luder]

It was not completely discarded, it was canceled after all the criticism, but they already said they're revising the proposal and will present it again.

 

Re:Outdated

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, maybe next they will start taxing the size of my dick. Idiots.

Re:Outdated

[miknix]

Indeed. Still, coming from a Portuguese itself, this is the most stupid idea ever! I got a better idea, why don't they reduce the parliament size to the minimum required by law and reduce their own wages to a sane value?

Did my Portuguese friends knew that the government servers that used to run Linux were just migrated to Microsoft DURING A RECESSIVE CRISIS?? It was for that reason that their web sites went down for several days:
http://exameinformatica.sapo.pt/noticias/internet/2012/04/04/sistema-de-redundancia-do-portal-do-governo-nao-funcionou

translation:
http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=pt&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fexameinformatica.sapo.pt%2Fnoticias%2Finternet%2F2012%2F04%2F04%2Fsistema-de-redundancia-do-portal-do-governo-nao-funcionou

Is someone willing to start a online petition with me?

Re:Outdated

[daneubauer]

It's already here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber_Intelligence_Sharing_and_Protection_Act

Re:Outdated

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Was it Descarted?

I think, therefore I am not a congressman...

Re:Outdated

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't. We did away with the 1/2 cent years ago.

Re:Outdated

[Grishnakh]

Yep, I'm getting mailings now that Facebook is backing some new incarnation of SOPA called "CISPA".

Re:Outdated

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the ""avoid becoming the 'next Greece'"", no in this instance you would become like the Romans.

Maths

[Spad]

Doubling the price of a 2Tb external drive? You're going to have to pirate a *shitload* of stuff to make up for that.

Re:Maths

[bmo]

It's Europe, so it will have to be a Metric Shitload, which is itself different from the Imperial Shitload, which is 1.125 American Shitloads

--
BMO

Re:Maths

[siddesu]

I'll just download Angry Birds for iPhone a million times and I'll be okay.

Re:Maths

[Opportunist]

Sounds like a challenge to me...

Re:Maths

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you be taxed on the total size of the drive, or just the amount of possibly illegal stuff you have on it?

Re:Maths

[Anonymous Coward]

Challenge accepted.

Re:Maths

[Anonymous Coward]

Because only the emericans can't use their own mandated METRIC standard!!!

Re:Maths

[imikem]

So this means Brits and Eurozoners are more full of shit than Americans? I wouldn't have thought that even possible. They must have better compression algorithms over there.

Re:Maths

[Anonymous Coward]

It all come from a royal ass regardless.

Re:Maths

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not the only bad math. This is RIDDLED with bat math.

First, two terabytes of storage is 2000 GB rather than 2048 GB.
Second, €51.2 is $67.41, which means "2.5 cents times 2048" is wrong. It would be 3.29 cents times 2048.
Third, since it's $67.41 and it's 2000 rather than 2048, that means it is actually 3.37 cents per gigabyte.

And, of course, if something like this ever passed somewhere, it would be idiotic to say "it won't affect real people". Of course it would. I'm sitting next to a machine here with about 20 terabytes of storage in it. And that's just one of several machines in my house. Not counting portable devices. That's a tax of almost $700 and that's on top of sales tax (which I presume Greece has), which means that for $1,000 in drives, you'll have paid about $750 to $800 in taxes.

Re:Maths

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I get those conversions in Buckets Of Crap?

Cheers

Re:Maths

[Anonymous Coward]

you're talking in crap-tons, not shitloads.

Re:Maths

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Don't forget, 10 Shitloads = 1 Fuckton.

Re:Maths

[bmo]

Shit compression algorithms work only once, at the factory where it is forced into bags by magical and undocumented processes that happen at the quantum level. The factory is owned and operated by entities outside our Universe who have refused repeated inquiries about this process.

Shit is incompressible once out of the bag. You can never put it back in, hence one definition of a blivet which is "10 pounds of shit in a 5 pound bag" equating to a 2:1 compression ratio at the factory.

People have tried to put shit back in the bag once it has been let out. Einstein, and Bose thought they got close to a theoretical compression, which they called a Bose-Einstein-Shit condensate, but they failed to take into account dark energy, which is an opposing force that tends to spread shit everywhere.

When Edwin Hubble discovered the expanding universe through red shifts, he exclaimed "Holy Shit!" and "What is this shit?" not knowing at the time that shit is the actual source of the dark energy speeding the expansion.

Minkowski described "shit cones" describing the causality of shit.

Stephen Hawking, in his famous paper proved through Feynman-Shit diagrams that black holes evaporate because they "lose their shit."

At the macro level, sometimes this is also measured in worm cans. Worms eat shit, which is probably why they too are incompressible once out of the can.

--
BMO

Re:Maths

[Anonymous Coward]

Yoho

And don't forget that Data compression would = Tax evasion.

Re:Maths

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you, I needed that laugh :D

Re:Maths

[Anonymous Coward]

But European content is typically more valuable. A BBC series is, say, 0.1 Shitloads while a cancelled Fox drama is only worth 0.03.

Re:Maths

[MightyYar]

Bullshit, we use milli-inches at work all the time. We also use a measure of grams-force/milli-inches^2, just to make the young engineers' heads explode.

As a benefit, I'm really good at converting between unit types now.

Re:Maths

[gparent]

I'm confused. How does the shit go from the bag to the 'shitbirds' of The Wire in this process?

Re:Maths

[bmo]

The bag comes in many forms.

You've never heard of a shitbird being put back from whence he came, true? Well there you go, more evidence of the incompressibility of shit.

--
BMO

Re:Maths

[Anonymous Coward]

Second, €51.2 is $67.41, which means "2.5 cents times 2048" is wrong.

What has the dollar to do with it? Hint: The smaller unit to the euro is also called cent.

Oh, and BTW, you didn't specify which dollar. US? Canadian? Australian? Altairian?

Re:Maths

[TeknoHog]

When Edwin Hubble discovered the expanding universe through red shifts, he exclaimed "Holy Shit!" and "What is this shit?" not knowing at the time that shit is the actual source of the dark energy speeding the expansion.

One of my students recently wrote about "the Doppler shit" in an exam. I didn't realize he was on to something deeper -- the thing that "happens" to the Universe every day.

Re:Maths

[ILongForDarkness]

Like a couple season DVD sets? Doesn't take much. In a way both sides are ridiculous the assumption that storage will automatically be used for media so needs to be taxed (Canada does this with blank DVDs and such) and the reverse is USUALLY ridiculous too: buying a 2TB disk for home use that will not have any pirated content, yeah I take 1k pics a day, mmkay?

Re:Maths

[ILongForDarkness]

I find in Canada people often use imperial for small measures of length and weight (a pound of chicken, so and so is 6'2") but at longer distances and weights switch to metric. Leads to really strange things like this car weights 2400kg how many "me's" is that?

What really messes me up is my mother calling a bucket of paint a gallon. Even though they used to be an American gallon and now are slightly smaller: they never were a gallon in Canada because Canada didn't use the American units ever as far as I know. I guess it rolls of the tongue better than 3.71L of paint :-)

Re:Maths

[ILongForDarkness]

They do and they refuse to allow the export of said encryption schemes due to national security concerns.

Re:Maths

[jedidiah]

I use whatever unit happens to be most convenient at the time.

I don't buy into the propaganda that something is bad because it is old. There might have been a good reason those measurements arose. They are themselves the product of years of use and refinement.

They aren't just arbitrary, defined by a comittee or some bearocrat that was high on a power trip.

Re:Maths

[jedidiah]

Don't be obtuse. If you asked a Russian or an Arab what a dollar is, what would they tell you?

Re:Maths

[Anonymous Coward]

From their point of view, it comes out to be the same value.

Re:Maths

[jedidiah]

The only ridiculous claim is that "everyone is a thief".

You may be too much of an idiot to take advantage of all of the technology that's widely available even to the average grandma.

We are not.

There are plenty of ways to accumulate terabytes of legitimate stuff. Multimedia is big. High Definition stuff is even bigger. If you think 2TB is big, you don't really understand the scale of stuff being alluded to here.

Plus, hard drives don't have to be full.The market shifts to larger drives regardless of whether or not the average grandma fills hers up.

Re:Maths

[Anonymous Coward]

they never were a gallon in Canada

I am old enough to remember when a gallon of paint in Canada was an imperial gallon, but yes, that was almost fifty years ago.

Re:Maths

[ILongForDarkness]

Yes and no. My work installs 160GB drives still in new systems: they simply don't want to encourage people to store things locally. Totally agree with you that drives don't have to be full. HD stuff is large, really large but how many people store it on their harddrive at home? Not a rip but a full 50GB+ bluray or worse raw video before compression? Very few people I suspect. But regardless the assumption that people are going to pirate without bothering to actually catch them doing it before fining them is crazy.

Re:Maths

[MightyYar]

We just use gallons because that's how the Brits shipped wine to us in the late 1700s when we rebelled. There was no "imperial" gallon then.

Now we prefer French wine :)

Re:Maths

[ILongForDarkness]

Wow it was. I'm 32 and when I was young I think it was a US gallon (3.78L), now it is neither something like 3.71. Could be that paint tech has improved enough that 3.71 of new paint is better than a imperial gallon 5 years ago but if not this is the pain of changing units: estimates of how much you need is usually in buckets but if the buckets change size ...

Re:Maths

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, except in the United States. Which is why they keep crashing probes and shit onto Mars.

Re:Maths

[Anonymous Coward]

bmo seems like an expert on Shit Compression Algorithm Technology (aka SCAT).

Re:Maths

[Anonymous Coward]

Methinks the tax is intended to pay for offsetting the (hypothetical) cost incurred due to your pirating.

Re:Maths

[stderr_dk]

That's not the only bad math. This is RIDDLED with bat math.

Holy hole in the doughnut, Batman! The Riddler is at it again!

Re:Maths

[jedidiah]

> but how many people store it on their harddrive at home?

Anyone that makes their own home movies.

You can find quite a selection of video cameras at your local Target or Walmart. How does that work if "very few people" are in the habit of accumulating video?

Even still images can get rather large after a bit of accumulation.

Then there are media purchase services like iTunes.

Then add things like PC games into the mix. Those love to eat drive space despite not letting you start the game without the original disk.

If you aren't using a PC like a glorified terminal, there are plenty of sources for accumulating digital cruft.

That's not even getting into things like buying an external expansion drive for your Tivo.

Re:Maths

[marcosdumay]

The name of the unit "gallon" came from the object named "gallon" that people use to hold liquids (and that happened before English even existed). Old units are that interesting. You know that "litter" was a measure of area?

Re:Maths

[marcosdumay]

They are the results of millenia of refinements. But you are the one arguing that the refinements stopped at the XVIII century. Those old units are indeed bad.

Re:Maths

[Grishnakh]

Your workplace won't be doing that for long. HD makers only make their drives in certain sizes, dictated by the technology they're working with and the market. They're not going to keep making 160GB drives forever, just like they don't make 1GB drives any more, and haven't for many years. I'm surprised they're even still making any 160GB drives (I'll take your word for it; I haven't looked lately); I would have guessed the minimum these days for a desktop drive to be 250 or 300GB.

Re:Maths

[ILongForDarkness]

True the number will change but the relative difference between commodity large drive and 3+ year old bottom of the barrel that corporate IT will ship to workstations will stay the same. Next batch might have a 1TB drive in it when 5TB is common for example. The funny thing is the logic is really dumb. I work at a hospital and no patient info is supposed to be on a desktop, and in practice no documents because we have freedom of information laws in affect which means everything has to be accessible to the corporate privacy officers. So ... small drives to discourage storing things locally. But really how much space does name social and health insurance info take for the typical 200k or so unique patients we see a year? 160GB is plenty. As you mention you can't get 1GB drives anymore, 160GB was probably the smallest they could order.

Which leads to more stupidness (user side): people doing clinical trials with anonymized data in my program but multiple different departments involved. They don't have a common network share between them that they can all access so what do they do? Pick a half dozen workstations and store CT datasets onto each one until its harddrive is 99% full and then go find another one. Fantastic. No backups, computer slow because not enough swap space, not enough free space to defrag the drive, everything they do they have to go to 6 or so different times on each of the workstations and then sum the results etc. Absolutely brilliant and these are people with at a minimum a post grad degree a lot of them MDs or PhDs. No one stopped to think: "hey we might want our data in one place and backed up, why don't we ask IT for a network share for our project?"

Re:Maths

[Grishnakh]

That's why you should be running Linux. It's pretty easy to set up Unix workstations so they have zero local storage, except for the /tmp directory, and all users' directories are remotely hosted. The users don't even have any clue where their data is physically residing. Windows was never meant to be used as a networked workstation.

Re:Maths

[ILongForDarkness]

Agreed for this kind of thing. I seem to recall you can do some magic (though probably not pretty) to mount a drive under a folder. Not sure if the folder can be a network share. If so you could just remove r/w permissions to the my documents folder (other than the hidden files/folders) and mount the network share with w/r access. Doesn't stop a goofball from throwing stuff in C: but at least hides from the average user that things in documents are actually somewhere else..

The problem is a lot of our client software is windows only (shocking) and about 20k per computer so not about to "just use something else" those apps because they are industry standard and need to be FDA approved (really Health Canada approved but since the US dominates the market they are effectively the same thing). Funny enough though another app we use is Solaris only. So our users have to deal with UNIX terminals (though most know nothing of the command line) using the really crappy CDE desktop and then work the rest of the day on Win XP :-)

Re:Maths

[Grishnakh]

The problem is a lot of our client software is windows only (shocking) and about 20k per computer so not about to "just use something else"

Yep, unfortunately that's usually the main problem.

Funny enough though another app we use is Solaris only. So our users have to deal with UNIX terminals (though most know nothing of the command line) using the really crappy CDE desktop

I thought Solaris switched to Gnome many years ago.

and then work the rest of the day on Win XP :-)

Not for long, I hope: MS is canceling all XP support in a couple of years last I heard. You can't use an unpatched OS with unknown security vulnerabilities for something subject to HIPAA, right?

Re:Maths

[ILongForDarkness]

Solaris switched but the GUI for the app is written for CDE as is all the manuals etc. This app is about 80k per workstation and as with anything if they change it they have to go through regulatory hoops in every country they sell into.

XP going away: God I hope so. I'm not in the US but since our vendors primary businesses are they'll probably just make it a requirement for feature versions which will force hospital IT to upgrade whether they want to or not (since software features are often needed to use multimillion dollar hardware features). That said the funny thing is our systems come with Win 7 licenses, our IT downgrades them (whatever MS calls the program we are in it so we have access to whichever version of whatever product we've purchased). The same company at a different hospital (McKesson they dominate the market and are humogous (~108B revenue) had in house software that targetted IE 6. They delayed the upgrade of IE because of this by several years. I can imagine the thoughts in their heads "No we don't have time to make our small app work on a modern browser, and since we are both your corporate IT AND the vendor of most of your non-MS software why do we need to upgrade? You'll buy the products we tell you too from us :-)"

1tB != 1TB

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:1tB != 1TB

[Anonymous Coward]

I can understand using capital K to mean 1024, since the lowercase version means something different, but this is probably the first time I've seen anyone suggest replacing properly capitalized SI prefix with a lowercase bastardization. So in that regard you're probably alone.

People who complain about missing 73741824 bytes (which is fair bit more than 24MB) per gigabyte do exist however. They just don't insist on such an obviously wrong solution to the well known ambiguity problem.

Re:1tB != 1TB

[Opportunist]

You assume people can do the math? They're overtaxed already when trying to figure out how they're screwed over with those "20% rebates" that rarely border the 15%.

Re:1tB != 1TB

[91degrees]

There's no lower case 't' SI prefix though. T is "Tera" which means 10^12.

There are some binary prefixes that indicate a power of 2. 1TiB = 1024GiB and so on. Unless you're averse to putting a little 'i' in your prefix, this seems like a reasonable compromise.

Re:1tB != 1TB

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not the problem. The problem is that you consider that kind of bullshit is acceptable. Here in the old continent when you say I'm selling this for 500€ it means that you actually have to sell it for 500€. Not for 600€+taxes+mandatory tip minus coupon-filling bonus for limited number of people who fill some bscure criteria. You'd get sued for that, it's considered fraud.

Re:1tB != 1TB

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

I dunno about that, but if my coworker calls a terabyte a tetrabyte one more time I may go postal...

Re:1tB != 1TB

[Sir_Sri]

How are they 'overtaxed' exactly? It's hard for me (a non portugese speaker) to get accurate numbers, but their federal budget is about 37% of GDP according to wikipedia, but they're spending is more like 43%. So they're under taxed by almost 16% (they would have to raise taxes by 16% to balance the budget).

Alternatively the could lay people off to try and cut spending by the 16%. Which would shrink the economy by about 3% of GDP (about 5 billion euro's), and leave the government not much better off for a year as they have to pay severances and unemployment for people who are no longer working, and since there are no new jobs being created on the iberian penninsula they'd be basically kicking them out of the workforce for the forseeable future, portugese unemployement would go from 13% to 17 or 18%, and revenues next year would be lower due to a smaller economy and tax base. This is the spiral of stupidity that greece is in essentially.

Obviously the tax rate and taxes people pay don't always align, or even come close to aligning, which certainly hurts greece. What effect it is having on portugal I don't know, but they may have more success catching tax cheats than raising tax rates. But they may need to do both.

Re:1tB != 1TB

[jedidiah]

I am averse because it is stupid and inconsistent. It flies in the face of decades of practice that represented the simplest and most convenient practice.

Forcing a base 10 mindset on a base 2 environment is just mindless nonsense that's contrary to the entire idea that metric was sold on in the first place.

GiB makes as much sense as a cubit.

An actual number can be specified in any situation where there is any risk of confusion.

Re:1tB != 1TB

[91degrees]

Hard disks have very little that relies on a base 2 system though, and the sizes have been given using the SI base 10 prefixes since the 1970's.

Stupid and inconsistent would be that 1kB takes more than 8 seconds to transfer at 1kb/s. Or if you consider 1kb to be 1024 bits, then it's bizarre that you been a signal of 1.024kHz to transmit data at 1kb/s.

Having different prefixes for base 2 and base 120 systems seems to be the only sensible options.

This proposal was rejected.

[Celexi]

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.

Re:This proposal was rejected.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but I like the idea.We should export the idea to the US. How else are you going to care for the 50% of the population that don't pay taxes, or social medicine?

Re:This proposal was rejected.

[Splab]

Dude, seriously? What right do YOU have to come here and destroy the rants with facts? This article is the perfect fear and trolling opportunity and here you are, ruining it with facts.

Shame! I said SHAME! on you!

Re:This proposal was rejected.

[jadrian]

I also find it quite amusing that this was proposed by a supposedly (central) left wing party. I have no party affiliation, and been looking for alternatives. I found MLS (Movimento Liberal Social) rather interesting. If you look at their website, they covered this issue as well as ACTA on their front page. They also seem pretty big free software. And as a bonus are for a stronger separation of church and state. And they are not an extremist party in any sense. I'm surprised they don't get more publicity, at least amongst the younger generations.

Re:This proposal was rejected.

[Anonymous Coward]

Make the people who benefit from those people's labor pay the bill. The fact is that if the rich didn't keep stealing from the poor, the poor would have the money to pay to support themselves. And social medicine you pay for by making people pay before they get sick.

Then again, you're a troll, so whatever.

Re:This proposal was rejected.

[eggstasy]

I have no idea where you're from, but in America, ALL of our parties would be to the left of theirs. Even the Christian right is... SANE and defends the standard doctrine of european social safeguards :)
They can pass all the laws they want. We don't have the means or the will to enforce them. We're a narrow strip of shore, back when we actually had borders, before joining the EU, contraband was the norm.
Half of Portugal can get to Spain in less than an hour.

Re:This proposal was rejected.

[Anonymous Coward]

"The 50% of the population that don't pay taxes" actually pay a larger portion of their income in taxes than the other half... just not federal income taxes, because they don't have any residual income to tax.

The only people who truly don't pay any tax are the ones rich enough to hire the best accountants.

Re:This proposal was rejected.

[SuricouRaven]

That 50% figure sounds highly dubious. Even the most determined homeless illegal tax-dodger is going to have to pay sales tax on occasion.

Re:This proposal was rejected.

[Anonymous Coward]

I also live in in Portugal, and I have to say that the issue was a bit more serious than that. The party behind this tax proposal was the main opposition party which was just voted out of government, and the author and main signatory of this law proposal was Gabriela Canavilhas, the former minister of culture herself. Rumor has it that the law proposal was written by the people in charge of a set of rights management associations, which happen to be near bankruptcy due to gross mismanagement.

The worst thing about this law proposal was that when faced with the sheer idiocy of it, Gabriela Canavilhas reacted by accusing the law's critics of being ignorant fools who completely failed to understand the law proposal. Meanwhile, while well established artists rallied against the law, a list of artists who were supposedly supporters of this law was published in the national media. Yet, once that list was aired some artists in that list said that their name was fraudulently added to the list, as they did not and never supported the law proposal.

Regarding the opposition stance on this issue, the only reason why the law was shot down was due to the public rally against the law proposal. Even far left parties such as Bloco de Esquerda and Portugal's communist party supported this law, claiming that it would bring much needed financial support for artists. The law proposal was only shot down when members of the government coalition stated that they would be voting against the law, and only after weeks of public outrage agains this law proposal and due to the fact that, with the austerity plan, they didn't wanted to risk any unnecessary negative backlash from the public.

So, in spite of the positive outcome, things didn't went so well as you would expect. In fact, it was a very close call.

Re:This proposal was rejected.

[jadrian]

I'm obviously from Portugal... did you read my whole comment? :S

Re:This proposal was rejected.

[icebraining]

the people in charge of a set of rights management associations, which happen to be near bankruptcy due to gross mismanagement.

And one wonders how, considering how they steal from the rights holders by failing to contact them repeatedly when they're required to. Because, of course, they get the money first from the companies and then they are supposed to distribute it through the authors, so they have every incentive to "forget" the last part.

Re:This proposal was rejected.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, that particular expression of the sentiment. is pure exaggeration.

It's also dubious for another reason.

See that 50% number? Even if it is restricted to federal income taxes, you have to look at the population, which includes a healthy percentage of disabled, retired and young adults who are still in college but filing separately. Or in the military. Yet everybody in the GOP would have you believe that every last one of them is a welfare-sucking couch sitter.

Re:This proposal was rejected.

[cpghost]

The only people who truly don't pay any tax are the ones rich enough to hire the best accountants.

Yes. But don't forget those who pay negative taxes, a.k.a. receiving handouts from the social welfare system. They do pay many indirect taxes like sales tax, but that is more than compensated for by their tax-subsidized income. Sure, it's not huge amounts of money we're talking about when seen on an individual basis, but on a national scale, depending on the size of the country and economy, that's many billions of negative taxes per year.

Re:This proposal was rejected.

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like GE? They're one of the companies examined in the tax report by the Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, which had a negative income tax rate.

Oh wait, they're billions on their own.

Re:This proposal was rejected.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm obviously from Portugal... did you read my whole comment? :S

Of course not, he's American :P

Re:This proposal was rejected.

[LDAPMAN]

The 50% statistic is based on only those required to file tax returns. This excludes the disabled, most retirees, and college students. What does the military have to do with it? While there are some exclusions for combat pay, military folks pay taxes just like anyone else.

Based on my own experience as a volunteer helping people with their taxes, the number is absolutely believable. The vast majority of the young families I work with actually get far more money back than was ever withheld from their pay check. The EIC and other credits mean these people make a nice profit from their tax returns.

Re:This proposal was rejected.

[Sir_Sri]

Only about 50% of the population works at any given time (these days). That should be a good clue that there are a lot of people who don't pay taxes because they aren't taxable.

As you correctly point out, the largest blocks of culprits are the (officially as counted) unemployed, students and the retired. The unemployed may still pay taxes if they have employment insurance remaining, but students from children to grad students pay no taxes, and a lot of retired people have fallen below tax levels, and there are a lot of people in that age group where one spouse may not have a pension at all. Leading the charge for rest of us, but I digress.

Income tax has a cutoff because even in 'more equal' countries, it's still not worth taking the relatively poor portion of the population. They spend all their income already, so you'd just be worsening their lifestyle and if you look at total wealth distribution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth) about 20% of the US population owns 93% of the wealth. It's hard to see how you'd get much from taxing literally the bottom 80% of the population. The way that is split is the top 1% (345k/year or more) have 43% of all moneies, the next 19% of the population control 50%. And then everyone else, who, as we say, include the half the population who don't work (too young, too old etc. etc. ). Those statistics are somewhat inflamatory but in comparison to everywhere else they're not as dramatically different as politicians in an election year portray them. Sure, the US is particularly bad for no good reason. But most everyone has a similar situation to varying degrees.

Re:This proposal was rejected.

[jadrian]

Actually he's Portuguese. Admittedly the beginning of his post is confusing and makes it sound like he is from the US. But then it becomes clear he's from Portugal. Sounds like you also didn't read his whole comment :P

Re:This proposal was rejected.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, no, that 50% statistic is based on pure hyperbole. Notice how it didn't come with a source? It also said "50% of the population" and was not qualified to your "50% of those filing a tax return" so therefore, it does not exclude the disabled, retirees or college students at all, and the reason the military was mentioned is because of personal familiarity with the low pay levels for many military families and their tax returns and need for various benefits. Yet who is going to say they're a bunch of lazy fuck-ups? Other than their NCOs anyway.

Besides, you're worried about the EIC? How much do you think it is on the aggregate? Then tell us what the Fortune 500 raked in on their negative tax rates.

exponential

[mechtech256]

A tax that increases at an exponential rate, what more could a government hope for!

Re:exponential

[Anonymous Coward]

2% to 5% is not exponential

Re:exponential

[chemicaldave]

HDD storage has grown at an exponential rate.

Re:exponential

[jeffb (2.718)]

You don't understand exponentiation.

Re:exponential

[Anonymous Coward]

haha you old smart-ass. look at the vertical scale, what kind of scale is that?

Ok

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Ok

[Anonymous Coward]

The PIIGS need more taxes? What bullshit. Taxes are so high everyone evades them. They need to actually collect the taxes that are owed.

Re:Ok

[Opportunist]

Taxes don't have to be raised, they have to be paid. Simple as that. As long as the large tax evaders can easily move money abroad without paying tax first, you can tax the crap out of people and won't get anywhere.

You can't squeeze lemon juice from a stone. Squeeze the lemons instead for a change. It might just work.

Re:Ok

[Sir_Sri]

Maybe a better way of looking at your problem is that they need to set taxes they can collect. Put another way, they need taxes that aren't so easy to dodge, or so expensive to enforce.

If the inability to enforce the existing tax laws is intentional (which it is, because politicians use this to shuffle their own money out of the country) then you need new taxes.

Way to kill the electronics retail business

[arkhan_jg]

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.

Re:Way to kill the electronics retail business

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt it; the ordering abroad part. Even with EU's free-trade it's rarely cheaper to import stuff with these kinds of taxes. For example as a German I already have to deal with copyright-taxes on almost everything (blank media, storage devices, printers, scanners and whatnot). Yet it's rarely cheaper to order them from abroad. At least that is my experience when shopping for components. My guess is, local vendors will eat most of the price increase.

Of course that also means less taxes from profits for the government from every single business and especially those who go out of business entirely. But hey, I'm sure the politicians have thought that through ...

Re:Way to kill the electronics retail business

[sFurbo]

At least for VAT, they have a system in place: The seller has to charge VAT. If his sales to country X is less than a certain amount per year (which I can't find right now), he must pay his countries VAT. If it is more than that amount, he has to pay the recieving countries VAT.

This, combined with the fact that Britain has 0% VAT on books, means you should order your books from small, British internet stores. Amazon.co.uk is no good, as they will be over the limit for most countries.

Re:Way to kill the electronics retail business

[icebraining]

Yeah, but your VAT/IVA is only 19%. When it gets to 23% like here in Portugal buying from abroad starts to make a lot of sense.

Re:Way to kill the electronics retail business

[FireFury03]

This, combined with the fact that Britain has 0% VAT on books, means you should order your books from small, British internet stores. Amazon.co.uk is no good, as they will be over the limit for most countries.

I wouldn't count on the 0% tax on books sticking around too long. The UK government is slowly removing the VAT-free status from types of goods.

(Some background for those outside the UK: VAT was originally supposed to be charged only on luxury goods. So most food was VAT exempt, as were things like books (since they have educational value). The things the government considers "non-luxury" are gradually being reduced - for example, heating your home, cooking your food, etc. are considered luxuries these days and the government charges VAT on gas/electricity.)

Re:Way to kill the electronics retail business

[Anonymous Coward]

They can get round them. (Same way I cannot import cigarettes or booze from the cheapest place in Europe at whatever time).

EU trade rules are useless for the most part. (Probably as designed so that the average citizen doesn't benefit much).

Re:Way to kill the electronics retail business

[Grishnakh]

Portuguese don't need to order things from abroad; they just have to hop in their car and take a short trip to Spain. Them instituting a stupid tax like this is like (in America) New Jersey instituting a high, stupid tax, which would just make everyone drive next door to New York or Pennsylvania to buy stuff. If you're German, it's probably a little different for you since Germany is a much larger country, and the likelihood of you living near a border is much lower; Portugal is tiny and narrow. Some other Portuguese person above remarked that half the population lives within an hour drive of Spain.

Re:Way to kill the electronics retail business

[Grishnakh]

At least for VAT, they have a system in place: The seller has to charge VAT. If his sales to country X is less than a certain amount per year (which I can't find right now), he must pay his countries VAT. If it is more than that amount, he has to pay the recieving countries VAT.

What if the seller is located outside the Eurozone, such as in the USA?

Re:Way to kill the electronics retail business

[Anonymous Coward]

Then the buyer has to pay VAT and if applicable import duties.

Old & Inaccurate

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Old & Inaccurate

[Grishnakh]

You sure it's really been shot down? We Americans thought SOPA and PIPA were shot down, and now they're trying to bring them back with CISPA. They're going to keep trying to bring that thing back until it finally passes when people aren't paying enough attention.

Absurd

[geogob]

... 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.

Re:Absurd

[jones_supa]

Something like this is already in Finland.

uh what? article expired already a few weeks ago

[Anonymous Coward]

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 /.

Re:uh what? article expired already a few weeks ag

[Celexi]

So weird to see such an outdated article in /.

I don't think that is weird at all in Slashdot

Move by SPA

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Move by SPA

[icebraining]

to try to get money to artists

Yeah, right. To try to get money for themselves is more likely. The SPA and GDA are constantly trying to get off from actually paying the artists and authors.

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't the government consider this proposal a bit ...ridiculous?

Re:Why?

[Opportunist]

You haven't been too long on this planet, have you? At least it's technically possible to execute that law, which is miles ahead of many others that have been proposed lately.

Where will my 1 TB itunes library live?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Where will my 1 TB itunes library live?

[aaaaaaargh!]

Heck, I have a 1 TB drive only for Windows, which I use exclusively for gaming (who still uses Windows for serious work?), and all those games I got from Steam sales and barely play have already almost eaten up the drive. I'll have to delete the local caches or buy a bigger drive soon.

Re:Where will my 1 TB itunes library live?

[mikael]

I can't wait to see the tax legislation for that one. You would have to provide a receipt showing that you purchased and paid tax on that device. Then you would have to provide evidence that various blocks of storage were used for legitimate purposes. One tax dodge would be to have duplicate copies of everything. Tax inspectors would have to go round inspecting everyones backup strategies.

Re:Where will my 1 TB itunes library live?

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody will get the bright idea of selling tax dodgers a 1TB file containing alternating ones and zeroes just so that people can show a receipt for a really big file

Re:Where will my 1 TB itunes library live?

[Anonymous Coward]

This tax isn't supposed to be targeted at pirates but rather at businesses.

Re:Where will my 1 TB itunes library live?

[Colonel Korn]

who still uses Windows for serious work?

Almost every person on Earth.

nitpicking: GB vs. GiB

[moronoxyd]

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).

Re:nitpicking: GB vs. GiB

[Anonymous Coward]

Even as a nitpick that's pretty minor compared to "The party claims that the tax will not effect the average citizen" - how often do taxes 'effect' (i.e. bring into being) people?

Re:nitpicking: GB vs. GiB

[SuricouRaven]

Sooner or later, someone is going to try to tax contraceptives.

Re:nitpicking: GB vs. GiB

[Anonymous Coward]

And since when do decimal-based currency systems measure twenty cents as €0.2 (as in "€0.2 per gigabyte," "€51.2," "€132.2," etc.)? They use two places for cents in Europe too.

Derrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Re:nitpicking: GB vs. GiB

[PsyciatricHelp]

Though. Will the charge be based off base 2 capacities or base 10 capacities? off base 10 2.5x2k but off base 2 is 2.5x1863.

Re:nitpicking: GB vs. GiB

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when do manufacturers of hard drives use Base 2 to describe the size of their hard drives?

They don't, but retailers will now.

1. Use binary units when declaring imported HDDs at customs
2. List in decimal and price them as if tax applied to decimal
3. ??????
4. PROFIT!

Re:nitpicking: GB vs. GiB

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course off base 10 capacities. Why? Because then the tax is higher!

Re:nitpicking: GB vs. GiB

[Hognoxious]

Strictly speaking It's incorrect, but people do it - particularly where the pre-Euro currency didn't have a subunit.

someone will come to continue

[Anonymous Coward]

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

€0.02, not €0.2

[monkeyhybrid]

Incorrect in summary and article.

Re:€0.02, not €0.2

[Another, completely]

a 64GB iPhone could be €32 more expensive

Isn't 64 x €0.02 closer to €1.28? Even at the originally quoted €0.2 that sounds very high.

Re:€0.02, not €0.2

[monkeyhybrid]

There are different tariffs for different types of storage, the €0.02 tax figure I corrected is for hard disks of 150GB to 1TB, with smaller hard disks being tax exempt and larger hard drives at slightly higher tax (€0.025).

Mobile phones and similar (MP3 players?) would be taxed at €0.50 per GB so yes, a 64GB iPhone would be €32 more expensive.

USB pens and memory cards, €0.06 per GB.

Possibly the most ridiculous of all, photocopiers and multi-function printers will be taxed by how many pages per minute they can copy. Apparently a 70 ppm MFP could cost an additional €227 in tax.

Re:€0.02, not €0.2

[Another, completely]

Thanks for the clarification. If something like this were to be enacted, I guess it would be fantastic news for the electronics shops near the border in Spain.

Re:€0.02, not €0.2

[necro81]

Ok, so they aren't doing any better than Verizon.

Re:€0.02, not €0.2

[Anonymous Coward]

Possibly the most ridiculous of all, photocopiers and multi-function printers will be taxed by how many pages per minute they can copy.

I see an emerging market for printers intentionally slowed down by software, where an unofficial, but easily available patch can cause a massive speed-up ...

Aggravated tax?

[Radak]

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.)

Re:Aggravated tax?

[UCSCTek]

Aggravated tax sends you into torpor. Vampires will surely be dodging this tax.

Re:Aggravated tax?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually Aggravated is closer to the emotional tone this proposed tax would engender.

Now I can guess the MAFIAA's next scheme.

[FunPika]

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.

Missing keywords

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, the summary is missing the important keywords "...in an attempt to protect copyright holders." (as seen in the linked story)

Non base 2 correction.

[flimflammer]

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.

JEW tax

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a tax by the JEWS, nothing else. The poor, hard done by Jews who never do any manual labour. The poor, hard done by Jews who never dig fields, never harvest crops (backbreaking work), never dig up roads, never build houses, never build hospitals, schools, roads, bridges, never work in factories on production lines, but they sure do like making LAWS that tax everybody else for OUR LABOUR.

But then, I forget - they are apparently 'God's chosen people', and we are their 'cattle' (goyim) who are 'beasts on two legs', here to serve them, as our masters...

Don't believe me? Try Googling it all.

heavy tariffs on imports

[FudRucker]

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

Re:heavy tariffs on imports

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you buy cheap Chinese goods or products for any other slave state? If you do, you are part of the problem. If you don't, then I commend and thank you.

Re:heavy tariffs on imports

[Opportunist]

I try to avoid slave work goods wherever I can. It ain't easy, especially in the area of electronics. I buy my coffee fair traded, I am as PC as they come.

But how many can afford that luxury? Because, yes, I'm "rich" by current standards. Meaning, I earn more money than I need for bare existence. It's a luxury not too many people have. They CANNOT avoid slave work goods, not because they don't care, simply because they cannot afford to pay the "luxury tax", i.e. the price tag attached to goods produced here.

I don't judge people who have to buy clothing made in far east sweatshops when they try hard to make ends meet and they simply cannot afford to "do the right thing".

Re:heavy tariffs on imports

[icebraining]

Chinese people aren't threated by force into working in factories, they're forced because the alternative is worse. By not buying their products you're taking away their choice and helping to contribute to their famine.

http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/smokey.html

Meanwhile, in Italy

[deepsky]

the government has considered taxing SMSs by 0.02€ each. (This is not a joke)

Re:Meanwhile, in Italy

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't text. This would be awesome. It is one way to reduce car accidents.

Clout computing

[ickleberry]

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...

[Scutter]

Just one more tax and I'm sure all of the country's money problems will be solved. Just ONE more... Honest!

Re:Just one more tax...

[Opportunist]

As long as they are still forced to buy war material from Germany and other EU countries instead of using that money to consolidate, I see little hope for Greece.

The whole "bailout fund" scam is nothing but a bailout for EU companies that sold crap to Greece and would now have to realize a loss.

mod 3own

[Anonymous Coward]

This posft up. real problems

Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Already have it in Hungary...

[Anonymous Coward]

...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...)

Re:Already have it in Hungary...

[Opportunist]

Hello dear neighbor. It's by no means any better to the west of you, same deal. Actually, exactly same deal.

For fuck's sake, LET ME BUY THE CRAP! I want to pay to see shows I want to watch in a timely manner and before it gets butchered by dubbing. It simply is not offered.

iPhone in Europe already support the Apple tax...

[Anonymous Coward]

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) !

Status update

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Taxing your way to prosperity - Genius!

[Viol8]

After all, its been such a success in the past .. oh , wait...

Braindead socialists , don't they ever learn?

640GB * 0.2€/GB = 128€

[Anonymous Coward]

640GB * 0.2€/GB = 128€
1TB * 0.2€/GB = 200€

This is pathetically retarded.

Re:640GB * 0.2€/GB = 128€

[monkeyhybrid]

It's €0.02 per GB, not €0.2. Article and summary both get that wrong.

Shelf tax

[programmerar]

Good, they should put a tax on shelves too. People put stolen goods on shelves as well. Hit 'em where it hurts.

Re:Shelf tax

[idontgno]

And fences, too. People fence stolen goods.

I suggest a levy based on fencing type. A nice picket fence of moderate height (non-privacy) should be something like 1.5%, since it's easy to carry out an illicit transaction over a pleasant waist-high fence. OTOH, a 3-meter-tall chain link topped with razor wire and covered in privacy slatting should be less than 0.5%, since no one can reasonably haggle over the price of stolen goods through one of those. And also, governments love those for their various "black project" and "star chamber" types of facilities.

Good for them

[Phoenix]

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 /.

Regardless

[wienerschnizzel]

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!

Re:Regardless

[icebraining]

As a Portuguese citizen, I'm not.

Re:Regardless

[aurispector]

Yep. Pretty much the entire western world has a spending problem, not a revenue problem. Yet the politicians and policy makers consistently get it backwards.

It's the kind of magical thinking that caused Kagan to say "It's just a pile of federal money", apparently not realizing that it all comes from taxes on you.

Re:Regardless

[rev0lt]

You should. Printing money depreciates currency, and on a country highly dependent on energy imports and raw materials such as Portugal, the result would be a massive increase on the cost of energy, transport and production. Yes, even worse than now (I'm also portuguese).

Re:Regardless

[icebraining]

I'm just saying I'm not loving watching the events. Even if this is the less worse option, it'll still be way too painful for me to enjoy it.

Re:Regardless

[Anonymous Coward]

Austerity is what is killing Europe's economies right now. Yes, there are credit and deficit problems which will get worse with spending. But when your economy starts shrinking and unemployment skyrockets, you will also get credit and deficit problems.

There is no magic solution, but it is much easier to fix the structural flaws in a growing economy vice an economy in an austerity death spiral.

Re:Regardless

[DigiShaman]

There are two sets of people, predominantly left vs right thinking on the issue of money.

Left - Believes the money was never yours to begin with. Ownership of it is limited and its value subjected to change. Not a bug, a feature. It's called inflation (a form of backdoor taxation). The government is allowed to spend because - again - it was never your money in the first place.

Right - Believes the value of the US federal fiat currency is only worth the private sector progress that it represents. If everyone stopped working tomorrow and forever, the value of the US dollar would be worthless. When the government taxes and spends excessively, the fruits of labor have been robbed from the people. This includes excessive military spending way beyond the threshold of diminishing returns.

Re:Regardless

[wienerschnizzel]

I don't think it's a 'less worse' option. I think it's a much better option. What happens when the government wants to spend more?

Before, they would simply get the money out of all citizen by inflation through printing an excess of money.

Now, they have these three options:

1) Borrow massively - hopefully this is not going to be as easy anymore after what happened in Greece

2) Cut the costs somewhere else - either directly cut some projects or, preferably, start operating more efficiently.

3) Ask their voters to pay for the excess expenditures which hopefully will prompt the general public to start asking why are they not focusing on the option number 2 instead.

Re:Regardless

[Skreems]

Left - Believes the money was never yours to begin with. Ownership of it is limited and its value subjected to change. Not a bug, a feature. It's called inflation (a form of backdoor taxation). The government is allowed to spend because - again - it was never your money in the first place.

That is absolutely not correct. Please spend some time learning before you make more retarded claims.

Re:Regardless

[Anonymous Coward]

Informative!

You've simultaneously told us exactly how you (Mr. "Right") oversimplify the issue while also informing us about how you imagine the issue is perceived by anyone who ever disagrees with you about anything.

Yes, there are two sets of people. I'm going to call you "Einstein."

Re:Regardless

[Anonymous Coward]

God, politics on slashdot are fucking tedious.
Especially from over-privileged idiots who fancy themselves libertarians and can't shut up about it.

It's not as simple as you think. Nobody understands this crap, and you don't either. And neither does Ron fucking Paul.
Let's stick to what we know.

Re:Regardless

[Anonymous Coward]

Want to explain that one in more detail? It seems to me that either less spending or more revenue would eliminate a fiscal deficit, and that both have their advantages and disadvantages.

Re:Regardless

[LDAPMAN]

Then please enlighten us as to how the Left views money.

Re:Regardless

[khallow]

but it is much easier to fix the structural flaws in a growing economy vice an economy in an austerity death spiral.

One of the structural flaws being that there's not enough political will to address them until the economy falls into the above trap. As I see it, repeatedly and routinely getting into the above situation is worse than a rare bout of "austerity death spiral" which is combined with credible structural reform.

Re:Regardless

[wienerschnizzel]

It's not just about the amount of money being spent it's also about the direction it's being spent towards.

Imagine your daughter would ask you for a raise in her budget. You would immediately ask what she wants to spend it for. Does she want to give out more money for clubbing? Is it for a special study program? You might also look at how much you are giving her already and what is she using it for. Is she buying a whole lot of expensive clothes? Is she flipping burgers in her spare time just to get by on her tight budget? And last but not least you would look at how much you yourself can afford to give her without putting a lot of hardship on all the other members of the family.

Now apply that line of thought on your own government. Chances are you live on planet Earth and your government is a spoiled wasteful daughter asking for more.

Re:Regardless

[Ksevio]

So because the recession caused tax revenues to plummet in many countries, that's a spending problem? Sure there is overspending, but saying there isn't a revenue problem is only looking at half the problem.

Re:Regardless

[icebraining]

Yes, that'll be great in two or three decades, when we finish paying the debt we already have and that is growing faster than we can pay it due to interests alone.

Right now, we are *still* borrowing more (and so is Greece, by the way) - that "help" from the FMI, EU and ECB is far from free.

Re:Regardless

[jedidiah]

Yes. That is a spending problem. No one planned for the likelihood that revenues might decrease and that we could have a "lean year". This is a basic fundemental problem that humans have been dealing with since the beginning of civilization.

You save up for a rainy day.

Yes. Having no rainy day fund is a spending problem.

Re:Regardless

[Ksevio]

A rainy day is one thing, a once in a lifetime economic downturn is another. Most people can't afford to save up for a meteor destroying their house, or for everyone in the household to lose their jobs for 3 years.

Remember when the US has a budget surplus? It was deemed to be a revenue problem - as in the government is collecting too much revenue from people.

Spending is half the budget problem, revenue is the other, equally important part.

Re:Regardless

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Doesn't seem to stop companies (airlines for some reason easily comes to mind) from raising their prices on products they make or services they provide because their input costs go up, their executives need a beach house in the Bahamas, or, simply, because they can (health insurance companies)...

I get services from the government, just like every other person does. In my personal case, they're what I'd call passive (roads and highways, fire & police protection, parks, libraries, other services). For other people, they're less passive (financial aid programs, special tax programs, subsidies, etc. you know, "welfare" and "entitlements").

But I guess it's me. I'd rather have a system that seems to work well for most people, and pay the fucking taxes for it, whatever their definitions of "well" are, even the people at the freaking bottom of the shitpile, rather than a system that is set up to pamper to and protect the positions of a few I-got-mine-now-kiss-my-ass or holier-than-thou people.

Read into it what you want.

Re:Regardless

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Not sure if you're trolling or just clueless about money. But I'll bite. Oddly enough you're wrong about both sides, so at least you don't have an agenda (that I can see).

All money value is theoretical, which what bugs me most about Ron Paul and the neo-goldbugs. Even gold has no value other than what we give it. We had to pick something of value, and gold just matched the characteristics best scarce but not too scarce, easily workable by ancients (smelts in the hundreds, not thousands of degrees), doesn't oxidize, etc.

BTW: Fractional Reserve banking was not created by bankers or the Left or the Right, but by goldsmiths in Britain who realized that when they started to create these notes that drew on gold deposits, they could create more than the deposits on hand. As long as things were stable and a small subset of people ever asked for their gold at any given time (we'd call this a bank run today).

Ownership of money is not limited - it can be created or destroyed as needed. Witness what the Fed had done during the Great Recession, creating dollars out of thin air. Why do they have value? Because we think they do.

The fruits of labor? The right is more about investment and solidity of value than worrying about labor. They worry more about capital markets, which would be hurt if inflation is high.

Governments tolerate light inflation for a few reasons. Mostly because it changes people's timelines for investment to the present not the future. I'll buy something now if i know it will be more expensive tomorrow.

Heavy inflation discourages investment - if I know the money i will get for this product 3 months in the future is less than the value of the investment now, I will not make that investment.

Deflation is even worse, it sets up a vicious cycle of no investment and layoffs. That's why we tolerate low inflation rather than zero inflation - don't want to be even close to dipping into deflation.

Please, go listen to old episodes of Planet Money, they're very informative.

Re:Regardless

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Yes they did. Keynesian economics realizes these things. That you build a surplus in good years so you have the money for stabilizers in lean years.

We even had that money... remember the surplus under Clinton?

But we spent it. The Bush tax cuts, the Medicare giveaway, the wars... it was squandered. And both Republicans and Democrats voted for it.

Re:Regardless

[DaveGod]

Pretty much the entire western world has a spending problem, not a revenue problem.

It's a deficit problem.

The objective of government isn't to be by-the-numbers economically advantageous. They have to achieve the many objectives mandated by their public, which mostly conflict - especially with the economic ones. Few things that a government does should be subjected to a NPV calculation to assure that the nation will run a net profit on it. Much of the purposes of government is specifically anti-economic and that's why you need a government to do it.

It isn't even as simple as meeting their objectives only in so far as their revenue allows them to afford it, obviously because spending and revenue interact, but also because revenue itself interacts with their objectives. Taxation itself is a mechanism to redistribute wealth. Taxation itself reduces the quality of life of the taxpayer. Arguably taxation revenue should be increased right up until the point where the government ceases to be able to provide more net utility than the individual can acquire for himself - although this has to be balanced with the objective that the individual has choice, and of course the government provides "public benefit" while the individual wants benefit to him personally. If we were to pretend that this is quantifiable, at what ratio do we say that X public-benefit is better than Y personal-benefit?

Government is about balancing the conflicting requirements of their citizens and as such is always about balancing both spending and revenue. You can only isolate spending as the problem when you can demonstrate that significant expenditure is either against the best interest's of it's people (which allows for what the people want, even if they're "wrong" - extremely subjective and even then rather difficult to estimate given most Western countries tend to have political parties divided between the high-spenders and the low-taxers) or that it is being expended significantly below a reasonable level of efficiency (again quite difficult to estimate given the objective is itself uneconomic).

[Footnote: I've gone with the usual bastardisation of economics above, which implies that economics is all about some kind of financial statement or the numbers. Economics is actually much more about value, utility and so on, with the financial statements/numbers merely often being the best-available measuring tool. ]

Re:Regardless

[wienerschnizzel]

Sounds even more like the Portugal government needs to start spending less *right* *now*! Or is that borrowing really helping with the debt with that 20 to 30 years time span in mind?

Re:Regardless

[Grishnakh]

BS. What we're having is not a "once-in-a-lifetime economic downturn". Peoples' memories are very short: we have economic downturns regularly. I don't know about your country, but here in the US there was one in the early 90s, one in the 70s, a giant stock market crash in 1987, etc. Economic downturns and recessions happen every few years (every decade at the most), and not planning for them is stupid.

Re:Regardless

[StikyPad]

You realize the the government-spent money doesn't just disappear, right? It gets put back in the economic cash flow stream, where it generates both more economic activity and more taxes. Repeat ad nauseum. Technically, if the government spent money fast enough, it could have an essentially unlimited supply.

Re:Regardless

[Anonymous Coward]

Well if the last look at the most debt ridden states in the US was any example, the far-vast majority of them were held solidly democrat for the last 40 years.

Re:Regardless

[binary paladin]

I wish I had mod points today. Excellent response.

And while I'm a big fan of Ron Paul, I can't say I'm ever thrilled when I hear things like "gold and silver are the only real money" because it's just dumb. "Value" is in the eye of the beholder and all a government has to do to give something "value" is made it acceptable for taxes. At that moment, it has value and can be traded.

As I like to ask all the gold freaks, "What happens when we can make gold ourselves? How does your system work then?" And I ask because it's going to happen.

Re:Regardless

[icebraining]

They already are cutting on stuff. The problem is that economies don't work like home finances. Our economy has been shitty for decades and now with the crisis and the cuts on spending (like salaries) is only getting worse (in 2011 the GDP has a negative growth of -2.8%), meaning we won't be able to pay the debt regardless.

Re:Regardless

[Ksevio]

And did the ones in the 70s, 80s, or 90s last for three years? The last time we had a situation where the economy went bad for this long was the great depression.

Re:Regardless

[rev0lt]

And everyone else. Germany is now realizing that broke customers don't buy german stuff, so the expectation is that all the eurozone will be in recession by the end of this year. France is hanging by a thread. Spain will be rescued by the IMF, it's a matter of time. The recipes you point already have been applied here, without much success. Small high-debt countries are a great target for investment and speculation, specially if they are inserted in some kind of insulation such as the Euro. Speculators can strangle the country's economy, without compromising their paycheck (because someone else will pay the bill). That said, this crisis is a sort of wakeup call for Portugal - we have great potential for business, but so far without producing results. Smaller companies that can't compete are being forced out of business aggressively. Looking two or three decades ahead, this is not a bad thing - the ones that resist will be major players, and new ones will be aware of mistakes of the past. Most of what's being done in Germany (and a part of it is filling up import forms from China) can be done today here at a fraction of the cost. But the mentality of local business (instead of iberic or european business) still strong among the older generation of managers - that are being weed out by the crisis.

Re:Regardless

[rev0lt]

Is your country that much better? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15748696 The problem isn't borrowing itself, but the interest rates. Countries that hold control over their currency (such as the USA) will try to solve any liquidity problem by printing money - that will increase the interest rate of future loans. The truth is, there is no country with real "excess of cash" - and that's exactly how the system works.

Re:Regardless

[rev0lt]

We wouldn't be able to pay de debt anyway.Can you cite a relevant western country with a growth over 4.5% the last year? Because that's about the growth rate we need to cover the almost-six-percent loan on the amount 3/4 of the government budget. The cuts are adjustments to reduce the need for additional loans to cover the hole, The shrinking economy will only aggravate the problem, since the government will need even more money to compensate the break in tax returns.

Re:Regardless

[HornWumpus]

This one is a double. We missed one. .com was weirding everything.

Re:Regardless

[HornWumpus]

So all we have to do is give all the teenagers black AM-EX cards and we will all be rich?

Re:Regardless

[kaatochacha]

In a sense, we do save up for those oddball chances. We invest money in our "rainy day" fund, call it insurance, and hope it saves us from fire/flood/whatever.

Re:Regardless

[HArchH]

Does it ever occur to any government that instead of finding new ways to raise taxes that they could just reduce spending?

Re:Regardless

[icebraining]

Here in Portugal, they are. Cutting salaries, subsidies and more. And raising taxes too, effectively giving the death blow to our already anemic economy.

Re:Regardless

[hairyfish]

Gold is as close as anything gets to real value because every human of every culture, religion and political persuasion values it, and has done for thousands of years. Doesn't matter what govt of day says or does, or what it tries to use as a substitute, everyone knows knows that if the shit hits the fan, anyone anywhere will still accept gold as having value. And it will do so when this govt is long gone and the next one after it. I can't think of anything that comes close in comparison.

As I like to ask all the gold freaks, "What happens when we can make gold ourselves? How does your system work then?" And I ask because it's going to happen.

Bit of a silly question. What happens when we can print our own money? This is possible now, but the economy still works (just)

Penis Size Tax?

[jackhererUK]

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.

Re:Penis Size Tax?

[Anonymous Coward]

^ Funny!

Best thing about that kind of a tax, who would want to be in the 'lower' tax bracket? There would be a rather difficult decision at hand at tax time...

Re:Penis Size Tax?

[umbrau44]

I think there may be a lot of self declared eunuchs...

Re:Penis Size Tax?

[Inda]

You've just admitted to the internet that you have a small cock. How does it feel? Tee-hee

Guy walks into the doctors. "I have a problem with my toe", he says.

"Let's have a look", says the doctor. "Ah, you have toelio"

"Then there's the problem with my knee", the patient says

"Ah", says the doctor, "You have the kneesles"

"What about this?", says the patient dropping his trousers

Looking closely, the doctor says "Ah, that would be small-cox"

-----

The old ones are the best :)

Re:Penis Size Tax?

[jackhererUK]

"You've just admitted to the internet that you have a small cock" Have I? I thought i was making a joke about the tendency of men to exaggerate the size of their penis and how this could be exploited by the government of Portugal to address their budget deficit. Probably you are right, it is very likely that my penis is so small it would require an electron microscope to view it in all it's minuscule glory. Or maybe I'm a woman, or a spam bot programmed for sarcasm.

Re:Penis Size Tax?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Do you think this would affect the stigma attached to owning a fancy car? No longer will you be able to jeer at owners of such automobiles, oh no, suddenly fancy cars will become more affordable with the extra money small willy'd bankers and accountants will find themselves with.

Re:Penis Size Tax?

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember a joke about this in the 70s. Different levels of graduated tax based on penis size. The two extremes were 'luxury tax' and 'rebate'.

Re:iPhone in Europe already support the Apple tax.

[SuricouRaven]

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.

Tax Businesses (Including Churches)

[Doc Ruby]

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.

Re:Tax Businesses (Including Churches)

[DogPhilosopher]

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.

In Europe, church taxes YOU!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_tax

Depends...

[AliasMarlowe]

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.

Just tax the crap out of cell phones

[gelfling]

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.

Re:Just tax the crap out of cell phones

[6031769]

Cell phones are ubiquitous to the point where even the UN considers them a basic human right.

Yeah, what's with the news these days? All we ever hear about is one humanitarian cell-phone drop after another.

Not exactly a sh*tload...

[rcwjohn]

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.

tax on claimed or real storage space?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now we all know a GB of storage is no longer a true GB of storage so which one are they going to tax? I hope they tax real GB storage or they are going to overtax everyone by a lot!

Not compatible with the EU Common Market

[cpghost]

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).

Tax breathing!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

wrong calculation

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

My god

[lightknight]

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."

2 moths ago

[rossdee]

Do you have a war on moths in Portugal? It may be more effective than a war on caterpillers

OLD

[Anonymous Coward]

OLD, law was abandoned.

Absolutely Insane Proposal

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Don't be silly.

[jeffb (2.718)]

It's a shibiload.

a 2TB drive is not 2048GB, and 1GB is not 1024MB

[Anonymous Coward]

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" :)

Higher taxes always leads to a thriving economy...

[scottbomb]

...NOT. Even JFK knew better than that (he cut taxes... something his party doesn't like to talk about).

Basic Math

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Refund

[Anonymous Coward]

When drive fails do you get a refund??

did you see a sign

[Anonymous Coward]

How much per dead nigger?

Gold Reserves

[suss]

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...

Re:Gold Reserves

[Khazunga]

Christ! Study your history, man. Portugal was pretty much flat-out broke by the end of the XIX century. The gold reserves were accumulated by a fiscally conservative dictator that ruled the country during the middle XX century (up to '74). You may argue that some of that richess came from Angola and Mozambique, but if you know Portuguese presence there, I can't see how you can call it plundering. When the Portuguese were kicked out, those two countries went 100 years back in time. Only now are they recovering, and the infrastructures are not yet even close to what they were in '74.

Re:Gold Reserves

[DogPhilosopher]

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...

A lot of it was actually plundered from the rest of Europe by the Nazis. They exchanged the gold for Portuguese wolfram ore.

http://gold.greyfalcon.us/gold6.html

"Allied intelligence concluded Portugal had received $143.8 million of gold from the Swiss National Bank, about half of the increase in Portugal’s gold reserves reported earlier in this chapter. Of this amount, the Allies were certain that $22.6 million was from gold looted from Belgium and of the remaining portion 72% was looted by the Nazis."

Anyway, it can't be used to pay of portuguese debt. It can't be sold in any significant amount, since that would seriously disrupt the gold market.

Let's get real

[Rambo Tribble]

Let's just have a universal breathing tax. To make it fair, all inhalations are free! Exhalations, however, will be taxed according to volume.

Shut yer whore mouth!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't give them fuckers any clever ideas.

This law proposal only shows us how stupid...

[Anonymous Coward]

... 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)?!

Perhaps I am too Conservative.

[jellomizer]

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.

Incorrect article

[Khazunga]

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.

Sounds like...

[MoronGames]

Sounds like a great way to ensure that no new data centers are built in Portugal!

So...

[J'raxis]

So I guess we can expect to see a booming black market in hard drives pretty soon.

Yes Tax Technological Innovation

[DarthVain]

That will solve all your economic problems. Good Luck with that!

We have had such a levy in Belgium for some time..

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Check ur maths

[metrometro]

> 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.

Bribe Yourself Lol

[ZombieBraintrust]

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.

Re:Bribe Yourself Lol

[pdabbadabba]

True. Maybe Newt Gingrich would have been a better example. It seems pretty clear that he would have been done months ago were it not for Sheldon Adelson's cash.

Are they trying ...

[Githaron]

... to piss off the geeks?

How about a politician tax?

[Githaron]

100% tax of your income money will go to the government if you are a politician. Problem solved.

new drives overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't wait for the 60TB drives to come out in 3-4 years. 500 MSRP + 1500 taxes

Same in France, with average success

[Damien Clauzel]

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.

"...tax will not affect the average citizen..."

[TonyXL]

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.

2TB = 2000GB

[hobarrera]

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.

Except that it's legally mandated this way

[jvonk]

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?

Re:Except that it's legally mandated this way

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, the receipt does have a line for taxes here as well. We just use division to calculate it instead of multiplication :)

What comes to the rest, "Europe" is more than one country so there's a little bit of variance around here. Where I live, cities can adjust their income tax, but that's pretty much it. So no local weird-ass taxes here. (until you cross a border, obviously)

Re:Except that it's legally mandated this way

[jvonk]

Oh, the receipt does have a line for taxes here as well. We just use division to calculate it instead of multiplication :)

Don't get me wrong... I think it's obvious from my post that I consider the mandate to be retarded. Perhaps a key difference here is that in the US the actual "parent class" of sales tax is called use tax. It is up to the consumer to pay use tax on all purchases of goods put to use within the state. Sales tax just happens to be use tax collected & remitted by the merchant. If it's not collected, the law says the consumer has to report & remit the amount of the sales/use tax on their own. As you can imagine, this voluntary reporting happens "approximately never".

Where I live, cities can adjust their income tax, but that's pretty much it.

Thanks for the data point. Does your city not charge property tax at all then? I have to imagine that some entity is charging property tax. Here we have composite property tax, because a variety of entities are allowed to tack on additional percentages to fund themselves. For example, the city, the county, the school district, etc, all levy a percentage that is totaled up for the overall property tax bill for a given owner.

"Europe" is more than one country so there's a little bit of variance around here.

Haha, yes, I am aware there is more than one country over there—duh! There's like three countries in Europe, right? (haha).

As far as I know, VAT is common to all EU member states. I expected variance in how cities were funded based on the specific country, so I had hoped to cast a wide net in obtaining responses from across the European gamut.

And an extra tax for those that can't do math?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Stamp Tax 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Payment in advance

[Quila]

If the money goes to the MAFIAA, I consider that payment in advance for all the copyrighted content I can fit on it.

Oh, so naive

[Quila]

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.

2TB?

[Anonymous Coward]

"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!)

Tax on *private copy*!

[rur]

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".

Gimme a break...

[Anonymous Coward]

...(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!

Re:Higher taxes always leads to a thriving economy

[Anonymous Coward]

Taxes now are the lowest they have been since WW2. Economy is doing great, right?

This was not mentioned yet but...

[Anonymous Coward]

...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.