http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,5866158%255E15306,00.html
Screenrights and the APRA want to impose a tax on blank CD's and DVD's in Australia to offset loses to "piracy".
There's also the issue of the precedent set. The proposal is a "infringing use copyright tax" of $0.10 on a $1 600MB write-once CD which typically contains 15 to 20 tracks.
So what's the tax on a 40GB hard disk that can be written to 7200 times-per-second and contain 13,000 or more MP3s? Depending upon basis of the the tax regime, somewhere between $17 and $1 trillion. Similar comments can be made about MP3 players with flash memory. And does paying the tax free you from paying APRA transmission- based fees (after all, you've already paid for the music, so why should you pay again). And does it free Australian ISPs from being hassled by overseas rights holders? I think Screenrights and APRA need to explain the implications of their proposal more fully. -- Glen Turner -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
