Every now and then (or, actually, rather often) you come across a story which once again exemplifies why governments should keep their paws off anything remotely related to technology. It seems that not knowing anything about technology is one of the prime reasons why governments the world over fail so spectacularly when it comes to technology-related lawmaking. The latest in the series? France. My southern neighbours (I never acknowledged Belgian independence) are thinking about extending their piracy levy, normally found on CD-Rs and mp3-players and such, to cover tablet computers as well. However, tablet computers running Windows are exempt.
Levies on empty media are pretty common in Europe, and are instated as a government-imposed and maintained revenue stream for big content – you know, because for some reason, the content industry is special and needs to be protected against the regular workings of the free market. In other words, silly levies like this ensure that the content industry can continue to not innovate and to not deliver what customers want, which is vitally important for gobbledegook keyboard button calculator humpty-dumpty bazinga.
The French government, already big content’s best friend (well, apart from Obama and Biden, that is), believes such levies need to be extended to cover tablets as well. The funny bit? Well, this levy will not cover tablets running Windows 7, since those are classified as full computers – while tablets running Android or some other mobile operating system do fall within the new taxable category.
I…
Sorry, but I think I just actually ran out of crazy. Good night.
“…but apparently Windows tablets won’t be counted, since they’ll be classified as full computers,…”
Maybe someone should sell it with a Desktop OS something like Ubuntu maybe ?
It’s mainly because the OS originates from a standard computer’s OS.
That’s where the Albis Commission (named after the guy who created the group deciding for these disgusting taxes) is again wrong: iOS shares it’s core Mac OS X with the eponyme computers… put a dash of Springboard and some heavy DRM/app management tools and you get an iOS (shortcut is easy, but there it is)
Over that: They want to tax devices that facilitate copying media… Again, it’s snap easy on a Windows Tablet, it remains a hassle (natively) on an Android, but it’s almost impossible without heavy tools and iTunes on an iDevice (which itself does all the DRM stuff)
The Albis Tax is unbearable, one of France’s best ISPs “Free” distributes a Set Top Box with it’s ADSL contract (google “Freebox Revolution” it’s an amazing device, Atom/Linux/PowerVR/etc… on best-effort unbundled ADSL) which contains a HardDrive… and they want to tax it over 40€
The very rare things I don’t buy are unavailable in France (US series without distribution contracts, therefore, I can’t really figure if I’m stealing anyone)… I purchase all the rest, and that is loads of music… and I’m being taxed on drives, dvd-r’s and all kinds of mediums I fill with Legal or self-produced material…
Not to mention, they are taxing to compensate “illegal” copying activities. Taxing something that is not supposed to happen is not only nonsense, but is itself illegal by law.
There are things that have been burning me up lately, especially since our current gov dropped in… VAT rises, which remains the most inequitable tax, IRS growth on the poorest segment, hidden unemployment hiccups, wired journalists (it’s stolen laptops season too!), public lying, insults, racism, the Woerth affair, triple-strike internet law… rid of it
I’m French, therefore I rant! 😉
Exactly what I said in my comment on numerama (http://www.numerama.com/magazine/17641_5-copie-privee-les-ipad-et-a…): how stupid is imposing a “private copy” levy on writable optical discs when the law forbids bypassing the protection schemes on CDs and DVDs?
With or without DRM’s or Protection: The issue is even simpler: Whatever the media is (besides a backup) you are not allowed to copy: therefore, Don’t, or Get Sued. But for god’s sake, don’t tax innocent people for things they didn’t do to compensate acts you are unable to maintain to a minimal volume. Damn, they really won’t understand it… Let’s go on a strike! 🙂
Heh.
To me, this says “If they’re charging you for something, you should do it”.
They want a fee for copying things? Copy them. Now you’ve gotten your money’s worth.
Sounds like a government-instituted subscription plan, to me.
If they sue, you can argue you’ve already paid ;þ
Some actually tried pushing a “Global Licence” fee to be honest… Something like a few bucks per year which would allow you to download anything you want.
Problem is that everyone would have had to pay for it, even those who wouldn’t want to.
So that proposal didn’t last long. Sadly, but I totally get why some didn’t want to hear about it.
Since my government has a levy on computer RAM modules as well as HDD, I pirate music all the time. Since, I am forced to pay for it anyway… It’s an ironic loop.
Since we all already pay the “penalty”, might as well commit the “crime”…
Agh, you beat me to it.
Ah, so you only say nonsense when trolling.
Grammatically correct down to punctuation, and what you say is sensible… but I didn’t know that the UK levies those… or are you Australian… a kiwi? The US doesn’t do this…
You _said_ English was your first language, so it must be one of those, unless you were LYING.
Click on my name to see where I am from
(BTW: My mother tongue is Russian)
Edited 2010-12-30 10:24 UTC
Ah, so it _was_ a lie.
No, You’re not French. French don’t speak/write English as you do.
Well… officially, I am. Tourists in Paris never believe me until I pop out my ID card 🙂 Secret is, I grew up in Florida (and a bit of Africa before that)
I take that as a compliment, so thanks for the day-long smile I’ll be wearing 😉
I second how good your English is. It’s good to see some people hang onto a language once-learned.
Thank you 🙂
You’re welcome.
Also good to see someone polite on the Internet.
Too bad someone else seems to dislike politeness…
Oh well, Internet=~IRL, got used to “people” in general 🙂
It seems someone’s targetting your posts. You might want to look into that.
o_O hmmm, I don’t see anything special, but my brain went on a break right now, gotta make my way out for a drink 😉
Every post of yours is immediately voted down.
Not cool, and cowardly.
Weird, not that I mind though… I see 0 voted down in my profile… But I can figure that not everyone embraces these off-topic comments that much to give’em a thumbs-up 🙂
Anyways 🙂
Happy holidays Ƶ !
If I may: your english is so “native” that you make the same mistakes as native speakers: “iOS shares it’s core Mac OS X with” etc…
Yours,
A fellow frenchman 😛
[I am not a grammar nazi (Godwin p!… No, wait), but for a non-native speaker, who learned the langage before speaking it (and not the other way around), the common mistake between “its/it’s”, “your/you’re”, etc. is really disturbing, because we pay more attention to the meaning (possessive pronoun/conjugated verb) than the phonetics. So Jaxx is really a native english speaker
]
Ah, damn, should read myself 🙂 Thx
Happy holidays to all btw!
Now that’s good English written by a Frenchman!
Smaller sample size, but flawless. I’m pretty sure there are many more people that post here that are not native English speakers that have perfect English.
We make mistakes with out own language, that is true. We speak English better than we type English.
I would suspect that you are French. There is also just a smidgen of ” not native speaker” sprinkled through out.
“shortcut is easy, but there it is”
“it’s snap easy “;
“I’m stealing anyone”
But, I also spent a couple years teaching English as a second language to native French speakers. I also leaned a bit heavy on automatic translation to get me through that semester of French (I’d write something in French and translate it back to English to see if it was close)
If you want to talk about a great language skills amongst non native speakers that hang out here, you’d have to tip your hat to Thom. If he just spelled it Tom Howard, I’d never know the difference.
Let’s say I left the US twenty years ago… I do make mistakes, whatever the language is btw, since I missed the earliest years in French, language I started learning only then.
True, Thom is a big notch better than I would ever be 🙂
Well, Thom is a professional translator. Rest assured your English kills my pathetic French. I think my French ancestors cry a little bit every time I pronounce the t in “croissant”.
Don’t fight prononciation or accent… I kinda find it so cute that most of my errr… girlfriends… are from UK or US, sometimes Russian 🙂
Is there a way to show you that I’m french also ? Show you my blue-white-red colored peter ? Seriously, you really believes that since you cannot master foreign languages, so do foreigners about your native tongue ? Grow up a little, I was told french are arrogant pricks, beside that’s your kind of people that drew me into this false idea…
Kochise
Excuse me but… are you talking to me? If yes, than I’m sorry but I don’t understand what you mean.
Relax, I don’t believe the remark was ment to be read in a bad way after all…
And I have to admit that French, from my POV, aren’t that good in foreign languages… Though my thoughts are totally biaised because of a special childhood. And until “state” teacher positions where opened to all european citizens, all we got were French natives with a severly flawed accents 🙂 Besides that, we had a good educational system… there are other issues to complain about now 🙂
Guess what my mother-tongue is?
(Pure OT, was ~taking your defence btw 🙂 )
French, but guessing you’re from Belgium, I believe you fell into multilingualism easier than France did… Better: the Flemish community being less understood by other places naturally jumped in bi/trilingualism quicker than others. It’s all about being to communicate with those that people deal with.
You have an advantage on us 🙂
France was self-centered for centuries, and placed French in large and remote colonies, why deal with another language when everyone spoke ours. Not counting it was the lingua franca of diplomacy until WWII.
History held us back, and all we say about rude waiters and french lacking english knowledge will fade away with the next generation or so as long as the current govt doesn’t focus on making a new breed of uneducated workers to fill factories 😉
Again, that’s just my little opinion, I’m no linguist, just a techie who grew up on three continents
Edited 2010-12-29 14:27 UTC
France was self-centered for centuries, and placed French in large and remote colonies, why deal with another language when everyone spoke ours.
So do several english-speaking natives now…
Kochise
True, and sad…
Gotta open my Russian lessons, tough!
I have a Norwegian friend. Her parents are Chinese. She also speaks flawless American-accented English. When she says she is from Norway people think she’s lying – until she begins speaking in Norwegian.
Well, Norwegian’s who speak proper English and have made no effort to hide their accent sound… Minnesotan.
Seriously, if I go ‘up north’ there’s little difference in accent, though most Norwegians have better diction…
…what, in French terms, defines a “real computer”. There must be some specific function(s) that allow them to categorise one as real, and the other as, well, whatever they’re classifying the other as…
hmm, no, it wouldn’t be interesting. Spare yourself that trouble.
I believe, in their heads, is a device which, in a form or another brings them some pocket money or free round trips around the world…
Trust me, solid word-of-mouth, been working in and close to many public services.
Deciders have no clue of what they’re dealing with, but they shove things down the pocket and nod with a wide smile before signing contracts. I shouldn’t be so naive, that’s how some places work in this crazy world…
But we where ahead on putting public services on FOSS:
The “Gendarmerie”, military institution in charge of public safety (~half of police forces), was full OpenOffice with lots of Linux, until, “Hoho! AFNIC (Fr’s Standardization org) drop it’s pants at the ISO commission and let OOXML live it’s life, now let’s all go back to MS-Office/Windows” with the extra training costs and licences…
I have friends in key positions who have a contractual obligation to install MS Products everywhere… hopefully, they secretly install a couple of Debians around to get things working again.
A relative was leading the IT dept. in a very big cultural/educational institution in Paris… they “unfortunately” got a 10 year contract (NT4 at the time), and boom, weeks of TV headlines “The ultra-modern library is bugging and totally unusable”
oops, getting OT again, 2AM effect… I’m not anti-MS, not really I mean, I have a VM lying around just in case, but they have very good sales teams.
Probably being possible to run trojan and porn application are the specific functions of a real computer
“porn application”?
Those exist?
Why?
As far as I know, it takes a video player, an image viewer, and maybe FlashPlayer.
You wouldn’t believe how twisted the human mind would be when it come to that… especially in Japan
Oh, those things.
Forgot about those things…
Blocked their existence out of my mind…
The last bastien of the ‘digital comic’.
I’m guessing that if the OS is made by Microsoft it’s a “real computer” and anything else is not a “real computer” because it’s not powered by Microsoft…
be happy! like the song says. You didn’t run out of crazy, not with what all the silliness the MPs and government are doing. There’s no word in any language for it although the French “débile” (retarded) comes closest.
Yes you didn’t because there’s more (from a “3rd hand” linked page at http://www.numerama.com/magazine/17641-copie-privee-les-ipad-et-aut…):
“Some” GPS units and car radios will also be subject to that levy… A levy that is supposed to be a targeted at “private copies”. Enjoy a world of silliness! I bet we will see more juicy things ooze out of these putrid political brains in the coming days and months.
PS: for those who read French, the comments on that page are a real treat. Just added my own to the feast.
Oh yeah, forgot about GPS units… OK, some are becoming media-wise… But I can’t picture anyone watching his favorite soap on a thumbnail screen, nor syncing it at home or swapping an SD card to refresh some music playlists.
I fart in their general direction.
What the fucking fuck?
Since when does a mobile OS on a non-standard computing device have fuck-all to do with “piracy”? This truly stinks. And I thought this batshit crazy kind of thinking only went on in my own government.
Again, sorry for the language but this has truly pissed me off to new levels. And I don’t usually let things that don’t directly affect me anger me like this.
This makes me want to buy an Archos tablet, install Ubuntu on it and shove it up the ass of the nearest bought-and-paid-for French lawmaker. Sideways. With no lube.
God damn it all.
This makes me want to buy an Archos tablet, install Ubuntu on it and shove it up the ass of the nearest bought-and-paid-for French lawmaker. Sideways. With no lube.
Poor Archos device, it doesn’t deserve it ! Good french hardware maker though…
Kochise
No way.
Shove it in lengthwise, then _rotate_ it, so it’s lodged in there good and tight.
This made up my mind.
Gonna be writing a few deputies (left wing mainly, since I kinda have contacts that side 😉 )
Idea will be:
Having, in all those commissions and law/tax thinktanks, a proportion of tech-savvy and recognized people to calm those things down… A sort of BOFH in the group who will bring in facts and who’s main purpose will be to be as bitchy as possible. They will be hated, and will post in public what their arguments where and who the group/commission decided… (i own ‘igouv.fr’, could be fun)
Yeah, gonna wrap that up in a good way
The problem with that free market theory is that like many other political theories it does not work in the real world.
No one has interest in a genuine free market, because everyone wants a bigger slice of the pie. Thus it’s an unstable equilibrium, because once someone gets big enough through merit or agreements with other parties, he can pressure governments or crush competition and the pretty utopy is over.
A working market-based theory would make cheating governments impossible or undesirable, would guarantee that everyone has a fair chance, and would prevent small groups of people from getting more powerful than the rest of the world. Currently, it does not work this way however.
Edited 2010-12-29 10:10 UTC
The government may be pressured but at least it isn’t the government. If the government has a lot of power and it corrupts the only recourse is revolution or national separation. A free market system seems to have the most builtin restraints. As always any good system can be destroyed by people with poor integrety.
Assumption unsupported by historical evidence. Free(er) markets whenever practiced in history have produced more equity among peoples–and more importantly–opportunity (equal misery is still misery). In fact, it is the only thing that has ever produced anything of the sort. Granted we have never been allowed to witness a true free market, but the closer societies have come, the more the theory has been borne out.
Again… assumption. I know quite a few people who are interested in a genuine free market. They don’t want hand-outs, nor do they want government interference in their private affairs. That is the free market in its essence. In the USA, the current Ron Paul “End the Fed” craze is a perfect example of that.
However, I do agree that this is the crux of the matter of the free market. It depends on a culture that values independence. The worldwide revolution in intellectual thought beginning in the early 1900s brought socialistic thinking and Keynesian economics into every single Western society, as well as many non-western ones, and free markets fell out of favor. This mindset led the elite to view an economy as a giant hackable virtual machine which can be tweaked and short-circuited to get something for nothing. The orgy of intervention in economies is finally bringing us to another great depression, which I argue will be even bigger than the depression in the 1930s. The whole problem is to convince the general public that free markets are in their best interest (a tall order, I know…)
Somewhat of a utopian dream, but a good one. The world has already seen a working market-based theory (Austrian economics), and those in power have done everything possible to prevent that precisely because of the rest of your paragraph above. Every attempt to discredit Austrian economics has been done by those with a vested interest in preserving governments’ ability to practice the hidden taxes of inflation and intervention–all for the best possible reasons, of course. While we can’t say that Austrian theory is ‘proven’ (a loaded word in economics), we can indeed say that Keynesian theory is disproven, especially when judged by its own metric.
This is quite good for… Belgium.
All those frenchies taxpayers who will buy their cheap tablets/smartphones/Medias, on Belgian-fr-speaking-internet-sale-sites and get them properly packaged to their homes…
A personal message to Thom:
—————————
If you don’t remind what ‘Belgian Independence’ mean, and how we did it, come back here in Belgium. I will shake your brain with a big… Kick-ass. ;-P
I’d have to hurry because at this rate, there will be no more Belgium quite soon
.
Een onafhankelijk Vlaanderen spreekt me wel aan overigens. Vlaamse meisjes zijn altijd zo lief
.
Well, the latest news from the Netherlands isn’t that cheerful. They also had quite a bid of trouble forming their government. Also, why would Belgium end? It would make quite the mess: how to make a small state even smaller, in 500 easy steps.
Maar van de Vlaamse meisjes, absoluut gelijk!
Blijf met jullie Nederlandse fikken van onze Vlaamse meisjes. Stelletje barbaren!
Hoort daar een ‘
‘ achter of niet?
Uiteraard. Ik twijfelde of ik er nu wel of niet een zou achter zetten, maar ik veronderstelde dat de Nederlanders wel intelligent genoeg zouden zijn om de humor ervan in te zien. 😉
Je bent echter wel een Belg, dus we hadden zowiezo wel gelachen.
You have disgraced my honour and that of my country. Prepare to die.
Personally I never acknowledged the Dutch independence:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighty_Years%27_War
So after all the Netherlands/Belgium are just a tiny part of the Spanish empire:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/Spanish_Empire_A…
Not worth discussing about their own split, but if you wanna play RISK to try to regain them, I’m in.
Bork bork bork!
My guess is that those that want, say, an iPad without stupid taxes will pick one up whilst in another country.
Having seen the queues of guys from the sub-continent when the unlocked iPhone4 was released in London; it seems inevitable.
The VAT in France is 19.6% (AFAIR) around the European average so no doubt selecting a low VAT regime will also go some way to covering transit costs.
So the French retail sector will take a hit.
C’est la vie!
Why not a new tax on France’s tablets? Oh yeah there is none so let’s tax the people who buy those already taxed foreign tablets to make it hard for citizens to own a tablet without MSWindows that could be used for downloading online.
This makes no sense at all…I agree it is crazy as!
Second time today I had to pick my ears up from the floor ! Incredible ..
You don’t have to look too deeply into this story to realize that France’s (the minister of IT?) governmint is being paid in some way by M$haft for something, somewhere and without M$ software installed they won’t get the tariff or kickback. This covers their butt, particularly on a major emerging market of users. Sad day for France, and mo-money for the offshore coffers of the M$ giant.