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

Fine.

[Fished]

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?

Re:Fine.

[azalin]

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?

Well that was basically the deal when the tax was introduced. People will copy music on tapes/cds and there is no way to stop them. So the labels agree that private copying is ok and get some money in exchange.
That was back then, before the music industry decided that the losses from outdated business models and general economic decline, where because of piracy. As far as I see it, they have to choose: Either copying is illegal and therefor must not happen, OR they agree to non commercial copying and get some compensation for it (aka music flat rate). You can choose either way, but you can't have both.

Re:Fine.

[Kat M.]

Actually, in Germany (and several other countries), it largely means that. The levy on blank media, photocopiers, etc. is intended to compensate authors for the right to make copies for personal use without compensating the author or owner of the copyright. Personal use does not only include for yourself, but also family, friends, and acquaintances -- basically, it excludes commercial use and making the work available to the general public.

Whether that works well in practice is another question (DRM is a particularly tricky issue), but that is the stated intent.

More ideas

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

So...

[guruevi]

- 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.

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.

Re:More governmental abuse in Europe

[ChristW]

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

Re:More governmental abuse in Europe

[silentcoder]

>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.