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.
Already in Germany there is a levy on PC hard drives, that will soon become larger than the entire PC industry revenue if it is left in place. Within two years, as disk drive sizes move to terabyte class on notebooks, and petabyte levels on home DVRs, the tax will come to far outweigh not just the cost of the drive, but the cost of the device. Under this Netherlands law, if it were extended to the PC, the cost of 1,000 GB would be €3,280 ($4,300) and yet drives of this size will be delivered by 2007.
Ok, so who wants to move to Europe? Anyone, anyone?
4 comments:
That sucks pretty good. But yet, people would still want to move there. I don't know, I like America.
America freakin' rocks. That's European government for ya, always wanting a piece of the pie, even when they're not entitled to it
I don't know what kind of crazy tech you are talking about, but terabyte HD's on notebooks in two years? Highly unlikely. Not to metion the complete impossibility of petabyte HD's on any sort of computer (not counting supercomputers and the like, obviously) in two years, given that is about 5000 times the norm today (assuming about 200 gigs for a PC today). Get your facts right, man! Not to mention that these surcharges simply do not apply to most Europeans, like we Brits.
Hey, I'm not the one that wrote the article, I just quote it. The real problem is that they are taxing storage space to counter music pirates to pay for possible lost sales. This makes no sense.
Also I don't really count England as part of Europe, you guys aren’t socialist.
Post a Comment