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."

Comments

Re:Double dipping

[icebike]

The tax under discussion was supposedly to compensate artists for pirated sonfs movies etc, not just regular taxes.

Since no one could make a rational case that the major use of disk drives was to store and distribute pirates music, the media tax never was applied to hard drives. In fact the case for taxing media for the benefit of copyright holders was rushed thru during a time when most users had very little other use of cd roms, other than to duplicate commercial cd roms. (or so the claim at the time insisted).

So no, the tax under discussion was never paid on hardware.