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."
Re:Double dipping (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:More ideas (Score:3, Informative)
There is a tax on printers already
What Research? Liar! (Score:4, Informative)
Your "research" is utter nonsense. You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. As a Norwegian I had a good laugh at your expense!
To explain what teg (97890) referred to I'll translate the important part:
In 2010 almost 50 000 children, or 4 percent of Norway's youth population (ages 0-22 years), were recipients of care measures. Measures in this context includes assistance programmes including after school activities or holidays, offers of education or work, a separate home for young adults, or an extra "support family" for regular visits, financial assistance or even supervision of the home.
Removal from the home is the final resort, which you seem to have confused with care. Your confusion is natural as the British system is not very good or remotely comparable to Scandinavian systems, and your ignorance is probably linked to your attitude towards other Europeans.
Your "understanding" is probably based on the two recent Indian families that were prosecuted in Norwegian courts for their failure to treat their children properly. We don't want their children, you're just full of lies and groundless claims. The latest family physically hurt their son! What do you expect to happen? Their children are all in India now by the way. Why is that according to you?