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Dutch government plan iPod Tax |
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Friday, 29 April 2005 |
Dutch government plan
iPod Tax
Pocket-lint.co.uk -
UK
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.
Because of the fact that the great bulk of iPods are used to store legitimate
iTunes files which are Digital Rights Management (DRM) protected, this means
that copyright is being purchased twice over for these devices if a levy is also
paid.
The charge will be levied against every MP3 player, and is effectively a tax on
the MP3 format. Some efforts to place MP3 files under DRM protection will also
mean that these will pay copyright twice over.
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