Ipod and Taxes

2 things are certain in life. Death and taxes. I can imagine some country collecting taxes on music downloads since Ipod is one of the most popular gadgets this decade. See below

IF YOU were planning to set copyfighters alight with righteous anger it's hard to imagine a better scheme than proposing a surcharge on the amount of storage in MP3 players. This very thing is being suggested by the Dutch foundation Stichting Thuiskopie, previously an apologist for the levy on blank CDs and DVDs.

Let's even leave aside the essential absurdity of a proposal that would create such an utterly uneven market within what is supposed to be a common European shopping area that everyone would be importing iPods and other music players from Belgium, France, the UK…anywhere that was within the EU and wasn't the Netherlands. Unlike blank CDs and DVDs, which are recurring purchases, MP3 players are things that people buy only occasionally. If you're faced with an extra charge of €3.28 per gigabyte (that's €65.60 for the Archos) your gadget doesn't have to get all that capacious before it suddenly seems logical to spend the added tax on a short vacation instead. Especially given that the contents of any MP3 player change with some frequency. In the life of an iPod, a user could shuffle through terabytes of music.

Via Inquirer