Tim May wrote:
You're missing a more important point: there is no correlation between who is using the service or product and who is paying the tax.
Taxing a computer used for video game playing, for example, when absolutely no "piracy" is happening from that computer. An overly wide net.
Governments like this sort of thing, however. Tax everyone, then spend the revenues as they wish.
not quite right. it is NOT the government that collects, and this is not a tax. there's a "non-profit" organisation called GEMA that collects and re-distributes these things. the system has been the subject of criticism often, but works surprisingly well. that might be because the article doesn't mention the OTHER side of it. for example, paying a fixed sum to GEMA enables you to play music in public (say, as a shop owner in your shop) without having to deal with the individual artists and labels for "broadcasting rights". it greatly simplifies things for small shops.