ipod
04/28/2005, 8:30am, EDT
Thursday, April 28th
Netherlands tax could devastate iPod sales
A Netherlands proposed tax on MP3 players could devastate sales of hard disk players, such as Apple's iPod. The tax is set to become law in the Netherlands in a few short months unless the European Commission finds a reason to intervene. "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," reports The Register. "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." If this legislation comes into play, the surcharge will be as much as €3.28 ($4.3) per gigabyte. This might put €180 ($235) to the price of a top end iPod.
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I think people will order out of the country and just have the iPods delivered potentially, unless they find a way to tax that as well. Apple, come up with a Paypal plan or something and some form of warranty shipping plan for those brave Dutch that buy a iPod with no Apple store there to return it to.
This could actually work in Apple's favor, since pirated songs wouldn't be free anymore.
"We hebben een groot probleem!" (We have a big problem!)
"Ik heb een idee, laten we de belastingen verheffen!" (I have an idea, let's raise taxes!)
"Jij bent geniaal!!" (You're a genius!!)
Could it be that the lawmakers in the Netherlands have been smoking too much pot? Afterall, ganga is legal there. Pothead bureaucrats.