France : Taxes for video and mp3 playing capacity

Alejandro Enrique alejandro.enrique at gmail.com
Fri Jan 25 16:48:56 CET 2008


Ok, add Spain to the list of countries in which this tax exists.

So far we have this tax in CD, DVD, Hard Drives, USB memories, MP3 and MP4
players, MP3 playing mobiles, photocopiers, scanners, printers, memory
cards...

And they even want to extent this to "everything that can be used to copy
audio-visual material", I don´t know how far it can get but it is scary.
Maybe they want to apply this tax to paper and pencils too, because they can
be used to copy the musical notes of a song or its lyrics. Who knows what
will happen?

There are groups and organizations in Spain fighting against this tax and I
hope someday this pointless tax will be abolished.

I don´t know if the Neo will be exempt of this tax if it comes without the
software that makes it able to copy music, because even a hard drive or USB
memory (that are not able to copy music by themselves) have this tax.

On 25/01/2008, Pietro m0nt0 Montorfano <monto84 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Schmidt András ha scritto:
> > Richard Reichenbacher wrote:
> >> No direspect or anything but that's probably the dumbest tax I've
> >> ever heard of.
> >>
> > In Hungary there is tax on every _empty_ Compact Disc and DVD. The
> > concept is that you will store warez mp3 on them. So when I archive my
> > personal photos or software projects I pay tax for the recording
> > companies.
> > I don't know the current state but there was rumour about extending
> > the tax on all storage devices (including hard disks and flash pen
> > drives). Inside the EU it is legal to import gadget from any country
> > from inside the EU without paying taxes. So these devices can be
> > bought in the surrounding countries cheaper.
> >
> > You can disrespect it. It is a really dumb kind of tax :-).
> > US people may say it is stupid, but at least there are no software
> > patents here yet :-).
> >
> > SA
> Oh, in Italy there are no software patents but there is a stupid tax
> like that in Hungary, a tax that you pay on each thing which has the
> ability to store datas (empty CDs, HDDs,...), that's because you could
> "potentially" store something like illegal MP3s, illegal videos and
> pirated copy of anything, so that tax is made (if i can remember well)
> to refound the damage that anyone is subject. So, the logic will say
> that if you pay that tax you CAN copy anything and download anything
> legal or not from the internet, you are paying for that, but no, you
> can't. Yeah, it's a stupid tax but hey you COULD do an illegal use of
> the storage media....
>
> Cya
>
> Pietro
>
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-- 
Alejandro Enrique
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