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Comment by jorvi | Hacker News Reader

That sounds like a relic left over from a bygone era. Like the digital storage levy we still pay despite music and movie piracy only being rampant from 1990s-2000s :)

I love the EU but it certainly has its idiosyncrasies.

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More or less all tariffs and sales tax systems are like this; the rules are _always_ kind of all over the place.

My personal favourite example is when the Irish Supreme Court determined that Subway bread was not bread: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/01/irish-court-ru... (Bread had advantageous treatment for VAT purposes, but Subway's 'bread' has too much sugar to qualify.)

There's also the famous Jaffa Cake case, of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffa_Cakes#Legal_status , but I think the Subway one has an extra element of absurdity because it went all the way to the _Supreme Court_.

> My personal favourite example is when the Irish Supreme Court determined that Subway bread was not bread

Because it is not. Cola is not water either.

Importantly, Subway bread is not bread for tax purposes. For food standards purposes, it is.

> I love the EU but it certainly has its idiosyncrasies.

This issue does not appear weird.

There is some legally technical difference between a video camera and a still photo camera. Probably different tariffs or something. Not weird at all and it is not uncommon anywhere in the world for different classes och products to be classified differently, infallibly because of industry lobbyism to reduce their costs or to reduce their prices for their specific product.

The manufacturer chose to limit the product for the consumer for their own economic benefit. Nothing is stopping them from playing ball except their own profit motive.

So American and Asian consumers can pay the same price for the same device that can do more, but to protect me, the European, my device must do less?

It is I the customer who will pay the tariffs (they are always paid by the importer) - the manufacturer gets the same amount per unit.

Tariffs aren't to protect you. They are to protect domestic industry.

https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/eu-to-hit-some-di...

And "domestic industry" in EU means German :)

Don't be too jealous. Your industry won't win with German anyway, but at least German industry won't lose to China like the rest of the world, so as long as you're in the EU, you're still ahead :).

> but to protect me, the European, my device must do less?

No, I think it's to protect the European producer of devices that can do more from being out-competed by imports.

All countries have tariffs. All tariff systems classify goods in some way. On top of the fact that this is by necessity not ever absolutely accurate even initially, these classifications also lag technological development and consumer behaviour.

If there is one thing the EU has absolutely achieved it is to massively reduce and harmonize tariffs and trade rules, and make the rules less susceptible to the whims of political favor and lobbying of local industry.

Yeah, once upon a time I lived in the mountains in Canada and bought a lot of stuff from the US because at the time the Canadian dollar was more or less at par and far cheaper down in the US. I randomly came across the fact that mountaineering equipment was tariffed at 0% because back in like 1920 Canada, like many countries, thought being the first to climb whatever mountain would bring us national glory. Anyways, I would drive down Blain, WA to a parcel shop and collect the stuff I bought online and had shipped there, drive back up and claim it was all "mountaineering" equipment. Nope, those ain't ski boots, they're mountaineering boots, and etc.

I'd still have to pay tax on it, though. IIRC there wasn't any personal exemption amount if you'd left Canada for under 24 hours, unlike they have now. Sometimes they'd just wave you through even when trying to declare something, which was always a nice little bonus savings.

>> If there is one thing the EU has absolutely achieved it is to massively reduce and harmonize tariffs and trade rules, and make the rules less susceptible to the whims of political favor and lobbying of local industry.

To a (considerable) extent yes. But it appears to be going backwards - from 2021 online shops have had to know and apply VAT for a product to the buyers country, not the country in which they are based, and thresholds for charging and submitting this VAT were eliminated. Basically handing over more online retail to the likes of Amazon.

Different products have different VAT rates in each country, the only thing that can't be discriminated on is the (EU) country of origin. This is still absolutely susceptible to the whims of political favour and local industry lobbying. A recent example from Finland: https://yle.fi/a/74-20087643

[Admittedly I'm unlikely to be buying chocolate and crisps online from Germany, but if I were a German seller needs to charge the correct rate of VAT for each, which will likely be different from Germany and every other EU country]

It was just a outdated import fee from a time when it made sense to protect the domestic industry - due to technological developments the import duty was removed. In fact it was removed almost 10 years ago.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2016-00127...

The very raison-d'être of the EU is to remove all tarriffs between 20+ countries.

Without the EU, there would be a worse patchwork of rules and exceptions.

Patchworks of rules and exceptions can be beneficial. It allows for experimentation and/or competition as well as the fact that regulations can often enough not keep up with change and they can be more entrenched if done at a higher level. Where, when, and what is better harmonized across a whole market VS allowing variation is a matter of debate.

> I love the EU but it certainly has its idiosyncrasies.

That is an acceptable position and you will likely nor require further investigation as long as the criticism remains vague and is offset by positive sentiment. I too love the EU.

I have a family member of retirement age who got into the habit of anonymously expressing their love of the EU in the comments section of a local newspaper.

After a few months of this they received a phone call on their landline warning them that such public expressions are inappropriate and that there could be consequences should they not find a new hobby.

I too love the EU but I loved it much more 15 years ago.

Someone at the newspaper, or someone in state security?

Not 100% sure as they didn't introduce themselves but whoever called was able to get the phone number that the IP address was linked to and I assume both would have to have been involved in order to do that.

Creepy. If you don’t mind me asking - eastern eu?

Yes; former communist but not former soviet union. Old habits die hard I guess.

Not sure if we’re talking about the same situation, but the last time I was in Bulgaria, there was massive brain drain and a lot of, eh, ‘false nostalgia’ for a very different past.

But tons of money coming in from the EU. I can imagine a lot of public quiet, private ‘angst’ about the kind of situation you’re describing.

Wild guess - Romania? (If not Bulgaria)

Your guess is correct. However I've not personally witnessed any nostalgia for communism in Romania though.

If this story is true then I'm suddenly in favor of brexit while before I thought it was worse for everyone. Of course I live in the US and so my opinion should be of zero interest on anyway. Still if you live in the EU I would hope you are concerned.

What is this load of BS, nobody from the EU called because of facebook comments, your family member lied.

I never said someone from the EU called, we think it was someone from the national government. Or it could just be someone from the newspaper who knows someone at the telecom company and they decided to have a laugh.

> I love the EU but it certainly has its idiosyncrasies.

Tariffs around the world have weird stuff like that. Very little to do with the EU itself. Expect a lot more weird things like that to happen in the US now with the new US government implementing new tariffs.

This levy is not meant for piracy, but for legal access - like copying the CDs you already bought to your phone. Compared to what we used to pay on blank media it's not so bad. If the alternative is that you are not allowed to keep private copies of anything...

> If the alternative is that you are not allowed to keep private copies of anything

The alternative is that we download torrents pretty much everywhere except Germany which developed a private industry of lawyers extracting money from leachers and seeders alike.

Germans instead have VPNs set up in Poland or Ukraine and use their streaming websites.

Oddities in German copyright or related law don't just have that effect on piracy, they make certain forms of “copyleft trolling” by third parties (who may be in no way linked to the content creator) possible, or at least far easier. This isn't the only route to copyleft trolling, of course.

Refs:

https://doctorow.medium.com/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-...

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Copyleft_trolling

Fun fact: Stack Overflow possibly violated Creative Commons licensing by putting a Mullenweg-style checkbox in front of downloading the quarterly data dumps. They were notified more than 30 days ago. Therefore, almost all content older than 30 days on Stack Overflow is there illegally. Any lawyers reading? Go nuts.

Um... I am tempted to to file a 5000€ claim in the small claims court against SO in my jurisdiction for violating the licence to my contributions.

Easy money...

I reject this view of the law completely at least in Portugal. The law was introduced to add a tax to every storage media one can purchase with the premise that a percentage of that storage media will be used for what they call piracy. This in effect means everyone is assumed to be breaking the law in advance and paying for it in advance.

As for your point about alternatives, if they add a tax on oxygen you breathe, will you also then say "it's not so bad if the alternative is you are not allowed to breathe at all"?

And the funniest part is that when you buy from Amazon (ES, DE, etc) that tax is not applied further hurting the local shops.

In Spain every device you buy that has some kind of storage is taxed for piracy, the money goes to the local equivalent of the RIIA or book editors associations.

Same in France where the money goes to the local RIAA. Even if it’s a hard drive meant for Linux, or to store public domain stuff. It’s basically a mafia that gets our money despite copying for backup purposes being completely legal.

I wonder if the artists see any share of that money...

In France it’s called the SACEM and I know a few bands that are affiliated to this association because it’s pretty much mandatory if you want to sell anything.

Those bands are not famous but despite making sales, they only get a few bucks every year, or it’s the SACEM saying "we forgot to send you the check lol, no biggies." It’s the biggest legal mafia I can think of right now.

Most of the money collected is sent to huge artists (like what Spotify is doing), there is nothing indie about it even if they pretend it’s for the glory of French music.

Taxation has overhead. If they were to actually track everyone's use and intention on a case-by-case basis, everything would get massively more expensive, just to offset the amount of extra bureaucracy needed to handle this.

It's the same idea as to why reducing the amount of means-testing and other hoops to jump to get social benefits would save taxpayers money - sure, more people who don't need benefits would get them, but that's more than offset by what would be saved by eliminating the workload of (and government jobs dedicated to) gate-keeping those benefits.

The alternative should be that you can backup the stuff you own for free.

> If the alternative is that you are not allowed to keep private copies of anything...

That's of course not the only alternative. But the recording media levy isn't that bad at least in Finland. The income from those is distributed directly to authors and artists, skipping the labels and publishers altogether.

> This levy is not meant for piracy, but for legal access

Backups are already legal in France. It’s pure greed. Why should we pay twice? Also this levy goes to major labels, why should I fund the local Taylor Swift if I want to backup my computer?

> blank media

But we still pay that levy on blank media, phones, tablets, computers, hard drives, and USB keys. They even wanted to put that tax on refurbished items.

> the alternative is that you are not allowed

But it was already legal for the past 50 years. They added this tax, it’s not a gift for us, it’s yet another restriction on what was previously legal.

> music and movie piracy only being rampant from 1990s-2000s

Huh? It may have dipped at the time Netflix had everything streamable, but there's been a resurgence in the now years since it hasn't.

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