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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?
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.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Well, I live in The Netherlands, and one of the things that we witnessed the last couple of weeks was a new law proposed by the Minister of Safety and Justice (...), Ivo Opstelten. He proposed that people who have encrypted files on their computer should be pressed into giving out their keys, "but only if they are very bad criminals, like when hiding child porn or are terrorists". Oh, so, that's OK then...
Christ van Willegen
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I think you have the wrong thread.....and possibly the wrong medication.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
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)
>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.
Counter-argument: several of the worst laws introduced in Europe and the UK over the past decades have been defeated because they violated rights granted under European-Union law.
It's become the most successful democratic watchdog in history - exactly the OPPOSITE of what you paint, not a power-holder but a power-restrictor.
That is a very good thing. The EU in fact has only a very small amount of law-making power, but they have very strong rights-protecting and rights-establishing power - which PREVENTS the abuse of power within it's member states.
This is not something the EU is doing- this is a proposal by the NATIONAL government of Austria - telling them to go fuck themselves is EXACTLY what the EU is FOR - and WHY the EU is actually a GOOD idea.
Now of course (like everything else done by humans) it's not a perfect system - but if you actually follow the news - it's quite clear that the system with the EU is better than one without it would be. Some of the laws that got overturned just in Britain in the past few years for violating EU human rights clauses were truly terrifying, without the EU - nothing could have stopped those atrocities from happening.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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.
> 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?
Come and see the violence inherent in the system!
Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
As a resident of a small island off the West coast of Europe, and having done my research, I can tell you now that Europe as a whole is not innocent; particularly Norway, where one fifth of the child population is in State care
Uhh.... what?? That claim doesn't exactly seem to match reality. Just below 4% get some attention, and most of them get assistance in the family.
"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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You missed the word "suspected" out of your pseudo-quote.
Or is it "alleged"? I can't tell these days. Guilty until proven innocent, and all.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
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.
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!”
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?
Ow, you're right... one only needs to be "suspected" these days...
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Here's the original article (in Dutch): http://www.nu.nl/internet/2968803/minister-wil-ontsleutelplicht-invoeren.html
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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]?
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.
This would be a compelling argument if only the EU were a representative government.
As it is, the EU is much like Communist China - a patriarchal oligarchy making judgments about what is good and bad for its subjects. Are these judgments actually good? We don't know, because it has never occurred to the Mandarins to ask the subjects.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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.
I don't see that as much of a "counter argument". The Soviet Union and Roman emperors also occasionally did something good for their citizens, that didn't make those desirable forms of government. The EU in its current form is not a democratic institution, it is effectively an unaccountable, byzantine bureaucracy.
If Britain, Austria, France, etc. don't manage to have reasonable democratic government that protects the interests of the people, how is that going to come about at the EU level?
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.