Sunday, May 1, 2005
Dutch Plans for "iPod Tax" Could Kill MP3 Industry
Posted by James Fee in "NEWS" @ 05:00 PM
"A Netherlands proposed tax on MP3 players could devastate sales of hard disk players, and set up international waves over copyright legislation. The tax is being proposed by the Stichting Thuiskopie foundation, and is set to become law in the Netherlands in a few short months unless the European Commission finds a reason to intervene. It is unlikely that will happen, as it has failed to come up with a policy for levy taxation so far. The idea of all levy based legislation is that some form of copyright collections agency collects tax by imposing a surcharge at the point of sale for any storage devices that could possibly be used to store pirated works. This certainly extends to the iPod which has up to 60 GB of storage, and which can store MP3 files."
Nice, talk about not understanding how the marketplace works. Taxes are hard on emerging technology, but a double tax (tax on DRM files and then the player itself) would really hurt. Of course consumers will bear the brunt of it as usual. :?
Nice, talk about not understanding how the marketplace works. Taxes are hard on emerging technology, but a double tax (tax on DRM files and then the player itself) would really hurt. Of course consumers will bear the brunt of it as usual. :?
