Austrian Blank Media Tax May Expand To Include Cloud Storage 129
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."
Fine. (Score:5, Insightful)
So... (Score:5, Insightful)
- 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:Fine. (Score:5, Insightful)
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That was back then, before the music industry decided that the losses from outdated business models and general economic decline, where because of piracy.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:More governmental abuse in Europe (Score:3, Insightful)
15€ Tax to anonymous artists to store my own (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
Re:Double dipping (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, I'm fine with it, because it means that I'm no longer a pirate. All my movies, music, games, everything, will be paid already.
Right?