My goverment is stupid- Piracy tax

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by MRT144
the tax is actually nothing short of brilliant. too bad its execution is poor

the far better place to do it would be in ipods, headphones, speakers, and things like that.

Headphones? Speakers? Even worse. You buy a CD player to listen to music on CDs you buy at the store and you're taxes on the headphones you use?

[Nubclear]

I would gladly pay such a tax, if the **AA's of the world would just go back to their castles and manors and focus on collecting their money, rather than suing people and attempting to force DRM on the rest of us

[MRT144]

Originally posted by KrazyHorse


Headphones? Speakers? Even worse. You buy a CD player to listen to music on CDs you buy at the store and you're taxes on the headphones you use?

you can recieve credits back on the tax you pay for each CD you pay for

[KrazyHorse]

That's ridiculous. You put a tax of X$ on headphones and you think people will send in proof of purchase to get a few cents of credit on each CD they buy?

[MRT144]

I know, but if theres going to be a tax, might as well make it feel like youre a kid again, sending in UPCs to get a prize

[Solver]

We had that a while ago. It totally sucked. Blank CDs became ridiculously expensive, at almost 1 USD per piece! Fortunately, the prices are back to normal now.

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by MRT144
the tax is actually nothing short of brilliant.

So when my band buys hundreds of blank CD's to distribute our own material, often free, we have to pay a tax to make rich execs and established artists even richer?

Brilliant.

[MRT144]

its an investment in your future! you should be able to write it off as a business expense

[MRT144]

I actually dont support the tax, I just want to see how absurd I can get with it.

[Cort Haus]

Business expenses are only useful if you've got taxable income to offset it against. The average loss-making band (99% of the bands on the planet) are not in such a position.

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by MRT144
I actually dont support the tax, I just want to see how absurd I can get with it.

Fair enough.

[MRT144]

Well, that should be incentive for you to actually make a profit cort.

[Proteus_MST]

Originally posted by Cort Haus


So when my band buys hundreds of blank CD's to distribute our own material, often free, we have to pay a tax to make rich execs and established artists even richer?

Brilliant.

If the same model is applied as the GEMA uses,
then you should include "classical singers" (like tenors and the like)
into this group.

For some strange reason classical music is vastly subsidized by the GEMA,
meaning that they get an overproportional share of the money the GEMA makes (the GEMA doesn´t distribute the money to the individual artist according to the CD sales (which would be fair) but rather use a complex distribution model which is only loosely based on the sales of CDs and the like.
If you are a rather unknown mainstream artist (for example a pop singer) youz get next to nothing if you are a member of GEMA, if you are a classical singer however you get much more than this mainstream artist, even if you sell only a fraction of the CDs this mainstream artist sells and give less concerts than this mainstream artist does
(Same goes AFAIK for german Folk music which is subsidized as well (which lets one guess that the GEMA execs subsidize music according to their own tastes and not according to the performance of the artists

[SlowwHand]

USA pays taxes on all but medicine and food bought to prepare at home.

Quit whining. Get no sympathy from me.

[KrazyHorse]

A few percent sales tax on all consumer goods is hardly the same as a targetted tax of ~100% (or more)