Taxes on hard drives

[Tim May]

At 6:27 PM -0800 2/14/01, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>
>BTW; I don't generally download music: I tried it and the sound
>quality of MP3 is crap.  I don't use windows; the engineering
>quality of the product is crap.  But I'd still rather pay taxes
>on hard drives than have snooping software installed in Windows.
>See, given the choice, I'd rather have taxes rather than snooping
>software accepted as "normal". -- At least for now.

A tax on a hard drive is a theft, a shake down. Rent-seeking.

Why should someone who is not downloading music or images (or 
whatever it is the tax is allegedly meant to support) be taxed thusly?

Should paper be taxed so as to support writers?

As to your preference for a tax on hard drives over snooping software 
in Windows, the solution is to to not use products with such snooping 
features. Or to find ways to cripple the functionality (as was done 
with the barcode scanner giveaway of several months back).

The "tax" approach is attractive to the thugs for the obvious 
reasons: more opportunities to shake down the proles and collect a 
percentage for themselves.

Practically, did the "tax" on blank tapes ever "work"? Of course not. 
Metallica and Eminem did not see meaningful revenues. The tax 
vanished into the maw of the government, the RIAA and ASCAP 
bureaucracy, and the pockets of the shake down artists.

(But some of us had the last laugh. The "Home Recording Act" tax came 
with the proviso that unlimited "non-commercial" copying was now 
unprosecutable. A friend of mine copied more than 4500 CDs onto about 
a thousand DAT tapes. The DAT tapes were purchased in bulk from a guy 
in Nashville for about $2 per 4-hour (highest quality) tape. Now, of 
course, CD-Rs can be purchased in bulk for about $0.28 per 80-minute 
blank, so my friend is now making mostly CD-Rs. He makes extras for 
me, for the cost of the materials, so I have about 500 CDs "for free" 
that are perfectly legal under the Home Recording Act. Of the 28 
cents per blank CD-R, how much is going to Limp Biskit?)

But, to repeat, a tax like this is a shake down.

--Tim May
-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
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Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns