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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