Italian Supreme Court Bans the 'Microsoft Tax'

An anonymous reader writes: In a post at the Free Software Foundation, lawyer Marco Ciurcina reports that the Italian Supreme Court has ruled the practice of forcing users to pay for a Windows license when they buy a new PC is illegal. Manufacturers in Italy are now legally obligated to refund that money if a buyer wants to put GNU/Linux or another free OS on the computer. Ciurcina says, "The focus of the Court's reasoning is that the sale of a PC with software preinstalled is not like the sale of a car with its components (the 4 wheels, the engine, etc.) that therefore are sold jointly. Buying a computer with preinstalled software, the user is required to conclude two different contracts: the first, when he buys the computer; the second, when he turns on the computer for the first time and he is required to accept or not the license terms of the preinstalled software. Therefore, if the user does not accept the software license, he has the right to keep the computer and install free software without having to pay the 'Microsoft tax.'"

Comments

And so therefor it follows and I quote

[alphatel]

Can I get a refund for my Mac OS too?

Re:And so therefor it follows and I quote

[Anonymous Coward]

DOES it follow when the hardware and OS are made by the same company and tied together?

Re:And so therefor it follows and I quote

[alphatel]

DOES it follow when the hardware and OS are made by the same company and tied together?

Probably not now, but eventually if this ruling is enforced, it would follow that the shenanigans associated with "I gave you that software for free you insensitive clod!" isn't going to work when you're buying Intel chips and marking up your own boards by 500%

Re:And so therefor it follows and I quote

[Solandri]

The analogy fails but still gives insight into what causes the current situation.

Using the original analogy, what's essentially happened is that only cheeseburgers are sold. There are no hamburgers for sale. It's cheaper/more efficient for the fast food joints to only pre-make and keep warm cheeseburgers, than to have separate lines for cheseburgers and hamburgers.

"But that's silly! Cheeseburgers have an extra component so are more expensive to make than hamburgers. Why would a restaurant only make cheeseburgers rather than only hamburgers?" Ah, now you've picked up on the insidious reversal of market forces which causes this pricing inversion. It costs money to put cheese on every hamburger. It costs virtually nothing to install Windows on every PC. So the fact that most people want cheeseburgers / Windows on their PC wins out.

That's right. Software costs almost nothing to duplicate. While it costs money to develop software, the cost to duplicate it is essentially zero. It's like if you had to feed a cow, milk it, and process the milk to make that first slice of cheese. But every slice of cheese thereafter could be replicated Star Trek-style for virtually zero cost.

So why are we paying $100+ for copies of something that costs Microsoft virtually nothing to duplicate. Because of an inherent flaw in Copyright law which basically eliminates market forces on prices. With manufactured products, prices decrease the more the product sells. You can amortize development costs over more sales, production lines become more efficient, raw materials costs decrease because you can contract to buy larger volumes. That's why the first DVD players cost nearly $200, but today you can pick up a cheap one for $20.

Current copyright law subverts this process. By giving the content creator absolute control over distribution over a unique product, there's no incentive for them to lower prices. What needs to happen is for copyright protection to somehow scale with volume. e.g. Your copyright lasts for life+70 years, or 50 million copies sold, whichever occurs first. Or a sliding scale for pricing. If you initially release a CD at $20 for the first million sales, the price must drop to $10 thereafter. After 10 million sales the price must drop to $5. $2 after 50 million. $1 after 100 million.

This would restore much of the original intent of Copyright which has been subverted by ridiculously long copyright terms - encouraging artists to create new works, rather than allowing them and their children (and their grandchildren) to live off the proceeds from a single highly successful work. In terms of software, it would encourage companies like Microsoft to constantly seek out new ways to improve their software rather than resting secure in the knowledge that people will "buy it anyway". And by keeping pricing more proportional to amortized development costs (sale price drops after development has been paid off), it'll discourage the ridiculous behavior where a company will use profit from one software title to sustain an unprofitable title for years in an attempt to gain a foothold in the market. That'll help new software companies break into the market (they won't be competing against a product that's being subsidized by unrelated software sales), and bring more diversity and dynamics to the marketplace.

I'm all for open source on widely-used software (e.g. the OS, TCP/IP stack, web server, etc). But going completely open source eliminates the market forces which allow users to tell developers what they want in the software. What you end up with is a tyranny by the developers which is very slow to respond to user likes/dislikes (VLC eventually let users change the mouse wheel function). Modifying copyright as I've suggested results in more of a middle ground, where market forces are preserved, but pricing control is not completely up to the content creator.

Tax and cost from a PC-vendor point of view

[Anonymous Coward]

Dell once explained why their Linux PCs weren't cheaper than similar Windows models. The average cost of a single customer service call to Dell was higher than their OEM Windows licence cost, and the Linux PCs had a significant higher number of customer service calls than the Windows-PCs.

Re:The elephant can forget. The geek never learns.

[thegarbz]

There is something distinctly fraudulent about buying a Windows PC and demanding a refund when you could have bought a Linux PC from the start.

Ok I'll bite. Show me where I can buy a Linux laptop, with a i7-4710, 1TB HDD, 8GB of RAM, and a GTX 850M. I can't seem to find one which doesn't say Windows 8.1 included in price in the specs. Note how I pointed to laptops? You ever realise that most of these issues don't seem to arise with PCs as people are able to build their own from the ground up?

Giving examples of the worst system integration you could find and using that as a reason why I should be forced to pay money to a company who's product I don't want to use is disingenious. Geeks tied up in knots about Linux Audio? There hasn't been a Linux distro I've used in the past 2 years where audio hasn't worked out of the box, then prior to the Pulseaudio debacle it also just worked though not as feature rich as now.

Now what is fraudulent is selling a product with a separate End User License Agreement, and then not accepting a return when that EULA is not accepted. Really sit down and have a read of the OEM Windows EULA next time you have a week or so free. There is a line in the EULA that says if you do not accept the terms of the EULA in full then you should remove the copy and seek a refund from the distributor. The only fraudulent act is not abiding by the very terms you try to force on your customers.

By the way I lied about the laptop. I do get a choice of OS. The choice is Windows 8.1 or Windows 8.1 Pro. Amazing. I feel so empowered.