Taxes on hard drives

[Tim May]

At 1:18 PM +0200 2/16/01, Sampo Syreeni wrote:
>On Wed, 14 Feb 2001, Tim May wrote:
>
>>(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.
>
>Somehow I think no one even thinks about creating such a provision, here in
>Europe...
>
>Sampo Syreeni <decoy at iki.fi>, aka decoy, student/math/Helsinki university

Without intending to insult Europe or Europeans, the main reason your 
kleptocrats haven't thought about such a proviso is because 
they...haven't thought about it.

Don't assume that because you don't have some of the same laws we in 
these united states have is because you have "more freedom."

As for copying CDs and the Home Recording Act, let me hasten to add 
that there has _never_ been a prosecution of an individual for 
copying CDs, before or after the Home Recording Act. Tens of millions 
of persons have been making libraries of records, CDs, etc., borrowed 
from friends and libraries, for many decades. Not a single 
prosecution.

I was merely noting that when the kleptocrats formulated their new 
"Home Recording Act," the new shakedown tax came with a proviso that 
made such a prosecution impossible even in principle.

Finland and France and all of the other European "havens of freedom" 
(yuck yuck) will eventually figure out what these united states and 
their fascist rulers figured out decades earlier.


--Tim May
-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns