By Jo Best, 29 April 2005 15:10
NEWS With the music industry making a lot of noise of late about how music pirates are sending them towards poverty, record labels' coffers look set to receive a boost with the news that there could soon to be an anti-piracy tax on iPods.
The Dutch government is being lobbied on the subject and a rights holders group, Stichting de ThuisKopie, has floated a plan that will see a 'tax' put on MP3 players and hard drives, to be paid to artists and producers.
The Stichting de ThuisKopie foundation denies that it has set a limit for how much the tax will be but reports in the Dutch press put the tariff at €3.28 per gigabyte of storage.
For a 60GB iPod Photo, such a tax would put the price up from €469 to €665 and even the dainty iPod Shuffle would see its price rise by 2.2 per cent.
The Netherlands already charges similar levies on DVDs and blank CDs - some €0.40 to €0.60 for the former and €0.14 for the latter.
Schemes to tax recordable media which could be used to store pirated material have already won favour in other European countries.
Fujitsu-Siemens was recently subject to a German court case which saw the PC maker forced to make a contribution of €12 per user to a rights holders' organisation.
An earlier attempt in France to pass a law to hold computer manufacturers responsible for their users' piracy failed, although levies are in place on other recordable storage media, such as blank tapes and videos.
Comments
There are 11 comments. Join the discussion
1. anonymous
If we're going to allow the presumption that all storage media are used to store illegally acquired property, we might as well send the police around to seize everybody's hard drives. Yeah, sure that drive's got an Oracle(r) database with your order-processing system on it. We've heard it all before, you lot are expert at hiding your files. Is that a USB drive around your neck? Put the cuffs on him, he must be a file-trader.
2. Bruce Sandeman
I completely concur with the guy from Virginia.
This is crazy, does that mean that due to these taxes that piracy becomes legal then? If you're paying a tax which is based on piracy, you might as well make the most of it, right??
Dutch nutters......
3. anonymous
Shortly to be followed by the plagarism tax on all writing materials?
4. Ken Hall
Utterly crazy!!! As storage capacity is increasing at a fast pace, this tax will cause a massive brake on hardware development and sales in Holland. How much money does this add to the cost of terrabyte drives? €3,280.00! and a 10 Terrabyte drive? €32,800.00 in tax on a drive that in 5 years may cost only €300.00
5. anonymous
Monks used to spend years locked in cells illuminating manuscripts
Then printing came along and turned out the same product more cheaply.
The church complained (not the monks) and wanted to tax the presses
Mainly due to the availability of books more people learned to read and write
The printers (not the typesetters) complained and wanted to tax quills
Now we have a similar step change in the music industry and the executives (not the musicians) want to tax blank media, the internet, computers and air
It's called progress, you change or you die
And for the record I don't download music, tv or films I have this other thing I do it's called a life
6. Dave
As a Dutch resident, I could see this coming a mile off. The Dutch government will tax anything and everyone - living or dead. We already pay a 40% tax on vehicles (apparently, their a luxury) yet still have higher fuel taxes than the UK.
The Dutch will moan a bit, then roll over and accept it. After all, they might be made redundant tomorrow and need someone to fund their 70% final salary unemployment benefit.
7. Graham Coles
Why don't they just tax air, then to avoid being taxed you would have to live in a vacuum!
I think if this law goes through, I'll consider I have the right to 3.28 EUR of freely downloaded music for every GB of hard drive space I own for mundane computing and DV editing work.
As I currently have a pile of hard disks amounting to about 2 TB, I guess that means I have about 4,500 GBP worth of credit for downloading music for free and won't need to ever buy a CD again ... perhaps I can get a refund?
Which particular branch of the mafia were proposing this extortion racket, presumably the RIAA or MPAA branch?
8. Nick Cole
Not everybody uses these things for copyright infringing activities. Or is this a case of the unproven minority case dictating to the majority as seems to be such a major theme of society today?
9. Lynda
I don't have any MP3 files and I don't want any MP3 files... So, why should I pay for the use of them?
10. Rob Gilbertson
I'm in favour- provided it gives me a licence to legally use winMX. They wont have this though will they- Big industry wants the best of both worlds.
11. Laurence Cook
If the Dutch do introduce this tax, how will they distribute the revenue to 'artists and producers'? Send millions of Euros abroad to Sony Corp?