Comment by jorvi
1 day ago
That sounds like a relic left over from a bygone era. Like the digital storage levy we still pay despite music and movie piracy only being rampant from 1990s-2000s :)
I love the EU but it certainly has its idiosyncrasies.
1 day ago
That sounds like a relic left over from a bygone era. Like the digital storage levy we still pay despite music and movie piracy only being rampant from 1990s-2000s :)
I love the EU but it certainly has its idiosyncrasies.
More or less all tariffs and sales tax systems are like this; the rules are _always_ kind of all over the place.
My personal favourite example is when the Irish Supreme Court determined that Subway bread was not bread: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/01/irish-court-ru... (Bread had advantageous treatment for VAT purposes, but Subway's 'bread' has too much sugar to qualify.)
There's also the famous Jaffa Cake case, of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffa_Cakes#Legal_status , but I think the Subway one has an extra element of absurdity because it went all the way to the _Supreme Court_.
Importantly, Subway bread is not bread for tax purposes. For food standards purposes, it is.
> My personal favourite example is when the Irish Supreme Court determined that Subway bread was not bread
Because it is not. Cola is not water either.
> I love the EU but it certainly has its idiosyncrasies.
That is an acceptable position and you will likely nor require further investigation as long as the criticism remains vague and is offset by positive sentiment. I too love the EU.
I have a family member of retirement age who got into the habit of anonymously expressing their love of the EU in the comments section of a local newspaper.
After a few months of this they received a phone call on their landline warning them that such public expressions are inappropriate and that there could be consequences should they not find a new hobby.
I too love the EU but I loved it much more 15 years ago.
If this story is true then I'm suddenly in favor of brexit while before I thought it was worse for everyone. Of course I live in the US and so my opinion should be of zero interest on anyway. Still if you live in the EU I would hope you are concerned.
Someone at the newspaper, or someone in state security?
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What is this load of BS, nobody from the EU called because of facebook comments, your family member lied.
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The very raison-d'être of the EU is to remove all tarriffs between 20+ countries.
Without the EU, there would be a worse patchwork of rules and exceptions.
Patchworks of rules and exceptions can be beneficial. It allows for experimentation and/or competition as well as the fact that regulations can often enough not keep up with change and they can be more entrenched if done at a higher level. Where, when, and what is better harmonized across a whole market VS allowing variation is a matter of debate.
> I love the EU but it certainly has its idiosyncrasies.
This issue does not appear weird.
There is some legally technical difference between a video camera and a still photo camera. Probably different tariffs or something. Not weird at all and it is not uncommon anywhere in the world for different classes och products to be classified differently, infallibly because of industry lobbyism to reduce their costs or to reduce their prices for their specific product.
The manufacturer chose to limit the product for the consumer for their own economic benefit. Nothing is stopping them from playing ball except their own profit motive.
So American and Asian consumers can pay the same price for the same device that can do more, but to protect me, the European, my device must do less?
It is I the customer who will pay the tariffs (they are always paid by the importer) - the manufacturer gets the same amount per unit.
It was just a outdated import fee from a time when it made sense to protect the domestic industry - due to technological developments the import duty was removed. In fact it was removed almost 10 years ago.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2016-00127...
All countries have tariffs. All tariff systems classify goods in some way. On top of the fact that this is by necessity not ever absolutely accurate even initially, these classifications also lag technological development and consumer behaviour.
If there is one thing the EU has absolutely achieved it is to massively reduce and harmonize tariffs and trade rules, and make the rules less susceptible to the whims of political favor and lobbying of local industry.
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> but to protect me, the European, my device must do less?
No, I think it's to protect the European producer of devices that can do more from being out-competed by imports.
Tariffs aren't to protect you. They are to protect domestic industry.
https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/eu-to-hit-some-di...
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> I love the EU but it certainly has its idiosyncrasies.
Tariffs around the world have weird stuff like that. Very little to do with the EU itself. Expect a lot more weird things like that to happen in the US now with the new US government implementing new tariffs.
This levy is not meant for piracy, but for legal access - like copying the CDs you already bought to your phone. Compared to what we used to pay on blank media it's not so bad. If the alternative is that you are not allowed to keep private copies of anything...
I reject this view of the law completely at least in Portugal. The law was introduced to add a tax to every storage media one can purchase with the premise that a percentage of that storage media will be used for what they call piracy. This in effect means everyone is assumed to be breaking the law in advance and paying for it in advance.
As for your point about alternatives, if they add a tax on oxygen you breathe, will you also then say "it's not so bad if the alternative is you are not allowed to breathe at all"?
And the funniest part is that when you buy from Amazon (ES, DE, etc) that tax is not applied further hurting the local shops.
> This levy is not meant for piracy, but for legal access
Backups are already legal in France. It’s pure greed. Why should we pay twice? Also this levy goes to major labels, why should I fund the local Taylor Swift if I want to backup my computer?
> blank media
But we still pay that levy on blank media, phones, tablets, computers, hard drives, and USB keys. They even wanted to put that tax on refurbished items.
> the alternative is that you are not allowed
But it was already legal for the past 50 years. They added this tax, it’s not a gift for us, it’s yet another restriction on what was previously legal.
> If the alternative is that you are not allowed to keep private copies of anything
The alternative is that we download torrents pretty much everywhere except Germany which developed a private industry of lawyers extracting money from leachers and seeders alike.
Germans instead have VPNs set up in Poland or Ukraine and use their streaming websites.
Oddities in German copyright or related law don't just have that effect on piracy, they make certain forms of “copyleft trolling” by third parties (who may be in no way linked to the content creator) possible, or at least far easier. This isn't the only route to copyleft trolling, of course.
Refs:
https://doctorow.medium.com/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Copyleft_trolling
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In Spain every device you buy that has some kind of storage is taxed for piracy, the money goes to the local equivalent of the RIIA or book editors associations.
Same in France where the money goes to the local RIAA. Even if it’s a hard drive meant for Linux, or to store public domain stuff. It’s basically a mafia that gets our money despite copying for backup purposes being completely legal.
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> If the alternative is that you are not allowed to keep private copies of anything...
That's of course not the only alternative. But the recording media levy isn't that bad at least in Finland. The income from those is distributed directly to authors and artists, skipping the labels and publishers altogether.
The alternative should be that you can backup the stuff you own for free.
> music and movie piracy only being rampant from 1990s-2000s
Huh? It may have dipped at the time Netflix had everything streamable, but there's been a resurgence in the now years since it hasn't.