By John Oates, 15 February 1999 00:30
NEWS A leading legal counsel has slammed EU proposals to control piracy as "laughable". The European Parliament decided on Wednesday to outlaw the caching of illegally copied material on the Web. It is also considering proposals to put a tax on blank CD ROMs to discourage people making illegal copies of music and software. Revenue raised would be given to distributors and publishers to cover losses made from illegal copying. Many EU countries already have similar taxes covering blank cassettes and video tapes. Nick Lockett, lawyer at UK firm Sidley & Austin, told Silicon.com: "If the tax is enough to discourage pirates they will simply move onto MP3 technology which is far harder to deal with." Lockett commented that there is already an interface allowing you to plug an MP3 player into a cassette deck and it is only a matter of time before there is a similar way to interface with a CD player. He called for a technical rather than a taxation solution. "They would be far better off getting record producers to put anti-copying technology onto the disks instead," he said. Lockett also pointed out that CDs are light and easy to post so any tax could be evaded simply by buying them from outside EU tax boundaries.
In order to post a comment you need to be registered and logged in.
Log in or create your silicon.com account below