History 2003: More French Duties on Storage

Just how far will the incompetence, or perhaps greed, of the French state’s Brun-Buisson commission go.

The latter is in charge of setting duties to compensate for piracy and data copying. That it taxed recordable optical discs, i.e. burners, we can accept. Then there were the taxes on multimedia devices integrating HDDs, already more difficult to understand.

But when it moved to tax floppy disks (all but extinct!), we thought we must be delirious. What of value could you possibly copy onto a media with only 1.4MB capacity? Not even a complete MP3 track, perhaps 15 or so digital images.

The new tax is €1.5 cents per floppy. Knowing that 60 million diskettes are sold in France each year, this amounts to a considerable €90 million paid to written word and image rights holders, with no distinction made if the floppy serves any other use than the storage of copyrighted text or images.

And they’re not finished yet. The French commission has now set its sights on all HDDs, not only those used in multimedia devices, but even those in all computers.

And why not add flash memories or even all RAM chips?

France has already imposed a tax on photocopies.

Next, they’ll tax this newsletter, followed by human memory, depending on its calculation performance and capacity …

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 186 on July 2003 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.