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Austrian Blank Media Tax May Expand To Include Cloud Storage
An anonymous reader writes "Depending on where you are in the world, blank media may have a secondary tax applied to it. It seems ludicrous that such a tax even be considered, let alone be imposed, and yet an Austrian rights group called IG Autoren isn't happy with such a tax covering just physical media; it wants cloud storage included, too. At the moment, consumers in Austria only pay this tax on blank CDs and DVDs. IG Autoren wants to expand that to include the same range of media as Germany, but also feels that services like Dropbox, SkyDrive, Google Drive etc. all fall under the blank media banner because they offer storage, and therefore should carry the tax — a tax consumers would have to pay on top of the existing price of each service."
Wouldn't the tax have already been paid on whatever hardware the cloud services run on?
A major factor behind the push by corporations to get consumers' data on to the cloud is the desire to eliminate piracy. Obviously, they can inspect what people are storing and easily catch those who are illegally sharing content.
With this in mind, when most consumers (who don't know any better) willingly move all of their data into to the cloud prison there will no longer be any justification (as if there is already) for these sort of media levies. So will they still be charging tax on the piracy-free cloud then? My guess is that they will be.
Fine, so long as the copyright lobby agrees that "taxed media" means "copyright license for whatever I download." Oh, wait. They don't do that?
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
A tax on pencils and pens.. You could use one to write down 1's and 0's.
A tax on paper. because what else would you write your 1's and 0's on.
A tax on empty boxes. They could be used to store pages of 1's and 0's!
How about a tax on austria for just being fucking stupid... yeah i like that idea the best. lets tax stupid! we'll be so rich!
- If you get infinite storage, do you have to pay infinite taxes?
- Isn't there already a levy on the media carriers the company buys?
- Don't most cloud storage solutions simply sync so you have already paid multiple times for each computer you own even though the media is identical?
- When will the artists see any of these millions they must've collected so far. Every single artist should be a billionaire with the amount of media carriers produced in the world.
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In Slashdot, all too frequently, we witness sniping of the US from smarmy "European" people who say that "human rights abuses do not happen in Europe." Of course these cowards never seem to tell us where exactly in Europe they are from.
But this is just more shit from European countries, and why as a NZer I want the internet to be kept out of the hands of the UN. And why letting the EU be able to write laws in for every European country is a bad idea.
The more power you give an organisation, the more that organisation will abuse its power.
Hard drives and SSD's? USB thumb drives? Cell phones? any piece of electronic gear?
As an American I don't really understand how the blank media tax is calculated. Is the tax applied based upon the size of the media or is it a flat tax on media regardless of size that is writable?
If the tax is based upon media size does data duplication and redundancy factor in? If I make a mirrored drive could I get a tax rebate because I've cut the effective space of the drives in half? Or if someone comes up with a compression algorithm that increases the effective size of the drive am I liable for more tax because I can store more songs as mp3s then as wav files? Should the cloud host be taxed based upon the advertised storage or based upon the actual storage usage? I can see most cloud storage pass through compression or data deduplication that drastically reduces the on disk size of media but shifts some data to meta data instead. Does it matter if some of that storage isn't inside the country?
The way I see it is that the cloud company probably paid a tax on writable media. And they're in essence providing a mirroring service which effectively reduces the overall unique media storage size. And the amount of data that the cloud company is actually storing is going to be significantly smaller then what I'm being provided. And if the data is being stored outside the country then the tax is effectively being levied on the import/export of the data which could be an interesting legal battle with the current state of trade treaties.
However if the tax is a flat tax regardless of media size then I'd suggest the cloud company roll out a single exabyte drive that is shared between a customer and the customer's closest 7 billion friends (with a decent user permission model of course).
How is the revenue being distributed? If the money raised from this tax gets used to compensate the artists whose work has been pirated, I would not have a problem with it. If the artists are not receiving even the pittance they normally receive (proportionate to the amount that ends up with their labels) then I really cannot see any way of justifying the existence of this tax.
halts maule.
would be quite happy to pay even 99% tax rate on what I pay for google drive.
99% of 0 = 0 after all.
*facepalm*
Of course if I pay taxes on media to cover piracy, that gives me the right to pirate right ? Right ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Rent-Seeking: "An attempt to obtain economic rent by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by creating new wealth." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking)
Next stop; taxing the amount of pockets in your coat, because they all offer storage.
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The ridiculous aspect of this tax is, that when I fill my hard disc with pictures I took myself with my own camera I would still hav to pay for example ca 15 € for a 1TB hard disc which can be bought for as little as 63€ (external USB 3.0)
Seriously, if the groups are getting this greedy, then it is time to kill the tax.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
There is probably a rights organization in your country asking the same kind of thing but absolutely no one is listening.
People should stop buying music for few years so we could shut down these mafias. They are financing governs! in the world to put imposts to pay them the
quality of life that their actions doesn't justify anymore. It is not the same to produce music today that it was 20+ years ago! Distribution of music is so easy
and so cheap today that it makes no sense that music is 10 times more expensive today! World is crazy and if there is a reason why there is crisis now
is that leaders politics are useless and tries to keep the world from spinning forward. We can't spend out tax money to give that to people who doesn't do
anything useful anymore ( talking about music etc. distribuidors ).
> It want's cloud storage included too.
Of course it does. Who wouldn't want free money?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
So if I went for "unlimited storage", would In be subject to infinite tax?
"Since no one could make a rational case that the major use of disk drives was to store and distribute pirates music, "
You poor silly deluded fool. This case has BEEN made AND has been accepted in at least Holland (Hardware companies are suing over it).
You are forgetting just how corrupt politicians are.
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You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Nuf said.
They should be able to apply tax to paper as well, in fact, just about any blank surface, like a wall, your desk, a road any thing that can contain text or pictures.They should seek to apply the tax retrospectively onto primitive humans for drawing on the rock surfaces of caves.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The EU does not write the laws for every European country, foolish Kiwi. The EU is a group of countries in Europe, not synonymous with Europe. This law is a national matter, written by Austrians [and other countries].
The revenue goes to the national associations of artists in the select European countries that have this tax.
Not quite sure it will help IT
Video
If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat
If you get too cold, I'll tax the heat
If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
harddrives, theyre crazy ;)
Your "research" is utter nonsense. You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. As a Norwegian I had a good laugh at your expense!
To explain what teg (97890) referred to I'll translate the important part:
In 2010 almost 50 000 children, or 4 percent of Norway's youth population (ages 0-22 years), were recipients of care measures. Measures in this context includes assistance programmes including after school activities or holidays, offers of education or work, a separate home for young adults, or an extra "support family" for regular visits, financial assistance or even supervision of the home.
Removal from the home is the final resort, which you seem to have confused with care. Your confusion is natural as the British system is not very good or remotely comparable to Scandinavian systems, and your ignorance is probably linked to your attitude towards other Europeans.
Your "understanding" is probably based on the two recent Indian families that were prosecuted in Norwegian courts for their failure to treat their children properly. We don't want their children, you're just full of lies and groundless claims. The latest family physically hurt their son! What do you expect to happen? Their children are all in India now by the way. Why is that according to you?
maybe we can put copyright people into trunks and run the vehicles over cliffs.
... a tax on HANDS!
Yes, it is the evil busy little human hands that actually do the copying, so tax them! Since everybody has 'em, well, there ya go; money for nuthin.
Yer welcome.
Someone made the interesting point that:
1. in Austria, the same copyright law that applies to creative content, Art, applies to software. ... SO ... should enough software people form a club to represent them, ...
2. But collected "tax" revenues are distributed only to "Artists", via an Artists' Rights representation group.
they could, legally, petition for income from the collected revenue
The reaction of the artists to this, is predictably, "What those techies do is not creative ..."
Artists. Hypocrites. Mostly.
(R)ule in Hell or (S)erve in Heaven [R]?
As an Austrian citizen I can tell you: With our corrupt government it will be implemented in a rush before the next election and some other populist topic (immigration crisis, the upcoming referendum on our Army, or Greece) will be thrown into the discussion like a smoke grenade to divert attention. Then after it is implemented the major services will block Austrian customers for using their services because the law is such a major hassle. Just like most Amazon vendors do not ship their blank memory cards and hard drives to Austria anymore.
It is a lose-lose for everyone.
Because that is the end result of this blank media tax.
Actually, this was discussed in my country when those fees where extended to CD/DVD media and drives. Technically, you should be able to go the local copyright holders office, prove that you use those disks only for your personally created content, and claim refund.
Not much money, but probably would send a strong message if enough people did it.
Listen folks. On the cloud or in your home, a hard drive is always filled with a pattern of 1's and 0's, all you do is change that pattern whenever something is written to it. No government has any say on how you arrange that pattern on privately owned items. Next the government will tax you because you have walls painted white.
Make a stand, and don't let them get away with anything else.
The point of cloud storage is that you don't have to care about the physical location of data. Cloud providers will just withdraw their storage servers from countries that tax them.
How much is the CD/DVD tax? How much would it cost to go down to the local copyright holder's office and prove you're using those discs only for your own personally created content? I'm guessing the former costs less than the latter which creates an incentive to just pay the tax and not complain. (Not saying people shouldn't complain, but that they won't bother complaining in great enough numbers to make a difference.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The irony, of course, is that most of the content that is actually being copied is American and British, yet that's not where most of the money goes.
Today it was reported that the EU commission has submitted for review a new tax on Oxygen used while watching media. The director EU of silly taxes responded to criticism of the new tax "after years of research costing millions of Euro's we can confirm that 100% of pirates consume Oxygen while watching stolen movies or playing games so we have decided to tax Oxygen". Some questions have been raised by fellow EU members about the waiver of the tax for all EU officials especially considering how much Oxygen they wast on a daily basis.
There seems to be a confusion here. I assume that this is the same case as in my country (Spain).
In Spain legislation allows you to make a private copy of ANY copyrighted work (even if you do not pay for it) as long as a) you do not re-distribute it publicly (e.g. go to a mall and give away copies) or b) make any money re-distributing it. In court redistribution through bit-torrent has not been considered public, but one to one distribution.
In exchange the government pays the Artists/Author's societies a lump sum (about 50m EUR or so). Money comes from the general budget and the tax on blank media.
This means that you are allowed to download freely from the internet any movie/music/book (software not allowed) you want, while being completely within the law. The cost per citizen/year ends up being in the low tens of Euros.
Needless to say, a) most people are unaware of this and think they are doing something illegal when downloading music/videos/books, b) the Artists/Authors' societies are pissed off and c) the government would like to change the law, but so far it has been unsuccesful.
I bet most /. readers would go for a bargain like this.