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

More governmental abuse in Europe

[tbird81]

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.