Leaked Documents Expose Global Companies’ Secret Tax Deals in Luxembourg
icij.org
icij.org
The only reason I think is because it was taken in front of the Amazon office in Luxembourg.
Any suggestion on how to ask for removal, and possibly compensation for damage?
EDIT: Interesting that people are downvoting a simple "talk to them, here's how" comment. Before going all litigious and looking up the specifics of fair use for various licenses, what exactly is wrong with asking them nicely?
I agree. Most likely they've just done a quick search and don't particularly care what photo they used.
So, it appears you have the photograph available on the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic Creative Commons license. The original story using your picture is attributing it to you. So it appears to me that they've done nothing wrong.
If you want to ask them not to use it then there's a contact page: http://www.euractiv.com/contact
That is not how I expected it to work.
The European Convention on Human Rights, Article 8 grants a right to privacy.
It is not clear whether or not the right under copyright law to copy an image is always sufficient to give you a right to publish the image. That depends on jurisdiction.
In the UK, for example, it does not, as a result of the way ECHR has been implemented in local law through the Human Rights Act 1998, though courts have to weigh Article 8 against Article 10 (freedom of expression) so it's not clear cut.
EDIT: The EU Data Protection Directive, and it's member state implementations (so in the UK the Data Protection Act, for example) also comes into play.
Consider e.g. that Google Street View was met with threats of lawsuits in many European countries until the blurred out faces - while Google had the right to take the pictures, and have the copyright to the images, privacy laws and human right laws in many European countries did not give them automatic right to publish those images.
Your comment implied that simply looking at the license was sufficient to determine whether or not there is a right to publish, and that is not always the case. All I did was point out that other rights also comes into play.
EDIT: To expand slightly: That you have published something yourself, in one context, does not automatically imply that publication in others contexts is ok. It may be sufficient in this case, because the article is hardly all that controversial, but you can not automatically assume that publication implies consent for publication elsewhere.
I'm not automatically assuming that - the guy explicitly licensed his photo as CC-By-Sa - I don't think any reasonable person would assume that means "don't republish" or "republish, but only where I approve"!
The recent controversy over the "right to be forgotten" is a good illustration: The "right to be forgotten" is not something that is explicitly part of law, but the result of an interpretation of EU privacy rights and the interplay with freedom of expression. The outcome of which was a judgement to allow people to reduce the level of exposure of information even when that information was already out there, and despite deciding that removing the information from the source in that case was going too far.
Secondly, copyright is by no means the only law that governs your ability to publish something, and in Europe "any reasonable person" ought to at least consider that depending on their specific country and specific circumstances they may run afoul of one or more other laws if they republish without checking with the photographer and subjects in the case of photographs that includes people.
The license only governs the rights to reproduce the image, but depending on other laws and situations, privacy rights, moral rights (droit d'auteur/authors rights) and portrait rights may all come into play (moral rights belong to the author (photographer); portrait rights lie with the subject - both are usually non-transferrable in the countries that recognise them; basic moral rights are explicitly recognised by the Berne convention).
In the US, slander and libel is mostly used to cover this. For example, the publishers are liable if they cause harm to the reputation of the photographer or anyone in the pictures.
First, "It is not clear whether or not the right under copyright law to copy an image is always sufficient to give you a right to publish the image" is misleading - yes copyright does cover the right to publish, what you're getting at is the special protection of the publication of people's images.
Secondly, looking at it from this angle, the Von Hannover judgements of the ECHR provide a number of criteria for judging the lawfullness of publication. One of them is the earlier behaviour of the person in consideration, from which (given the circumstances of him publishing the picture himself) it is easily derived that this publishing cannot reasonably be considered unlawful. Also the other criteria (is the publication harmful, circumstances the picture were taken etc) don't point at anything that would indicate that whoever published this picture, did so unlawfully. When you look at previous judgements of the ECHR, it is highly unlikely that a case would even be admitted because it seems self-evident that the person depicted didn't think through the effects of putting his picture online and/or doesn't like who is re-publishing his picture. Which is not a valid legal argument.
FWIW yes I have a law degree but have never practiced.
I did not make a legal reasoning. I pointed out that the issue is not clear.
> Secondly, looking at it from this angle, the Von Hannover judgements of the ECHR provide a number of criteria for judging the lawfullness of publication.
You can't only look at the ECHR, as the ECHR is not itself law and the national laws implementing it in each state subject to it differ greatly. The ECHR is relevant because it is the source of most of this legislation, but as long as the national laws implementing the principles are not in conflict with the ECHR, the can - and often does - add additional restrictions. Which is why I pointed out that the issue is not clear and that simply pointing to the license is insufficient.
As I pointed out, in the UK (which I used as an example only because I live here) it is clear that copyright is insufficient to control your right to publish. In fact, in addition to the Human Rights Act, the Data Protection Act and the Copyright, Design and Patents Act both add additional restrictions that may prevent or limit publication beyond copyright. I don't know the extent of legal restrictions in the rest of Europe.
But if we're talking about this specific case, there is a) copyright, and b) the additional rights of those depicted in a (potentially) copyrighted work, which in terms of the ECHR boils down to art 8 vs art 10. (privacy vs freedom of speech). Which, as I argued before, when measured against the criteria the ECHR laid out for the application and interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights, can only be reasonably explained one way in the current case.
More specifically, I do not see how national legislation can, in this case, give the GP any right to ask the website that uses his picture to take it down while still be within the bounds that the Court laid out in previous rulings.
Of course I'm just typing here between compiles with a quick Google left and right to roughly check the general validity of what I'm saying, so I did not do an extensive study on the implementations of various relevant laws in all signatories to the ECHR. So if you have any national legislation that you think would give the GP a case, and that would hold up when brought before the ECHR would be held in compliance with the Convention, then we can proceed from there.
The Fourth Amendment grants "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures", except that it doesn't, as evidenced by "Aggressive police take hundreds of millions of dollars from motorists not charged with crimes": http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/09/06/st...
The moral of the story here is that laws don't actually grant any rights. The rights we have are not bestowed upon us by governments, but are inherent to all of us by virtue of being human.
Laws don't apply to the ruling class and their cronies and enforcers. You need to see that there's no room for doubting that claim anymore. Not after zero Wall Street bigwigs have gone to jail for wrecking the world's economy, and not when police officers are actively just plain looting people.
Words on a piece of paper somewhere don't magically prevent people with political power from abusing you in the here and now.
EDIT: Downvoters? Care to tell me how I'm wrong?
Is it not better to have the opinion visible and actually have a constructive argument about that vs down-voting it to the point at it is barely readable.
And while I agree with you in theory that "laws don't "actually grant any rights", that's a matter of ideology. For all practical intents, they do.
E.g. in the specific case of the European Convention on Human Rights, it has the effect of granting rights by preventing signatories that have subordinated themselves to it from enforcing laws that try to take those rights away. The UK for example, have had parts of terror legislation struct down as a result, and have complied.
> And while I agree with you in theory that "laws don't "actually grant any rights", that's a matter of ideology. For all practical intents, they do.
Practical intents? Well, here's a practical example: if laws actually affected/defined rights, then the government could just pass a law that says "it's alright to kill innocent bystanders", and people would have no problem with it.
But we both know people would consider such a law illegitimate (and insane), exactly because passing a law that says it's alright to kill people doesn't actually make it moral to do so. In other words, rights are not defined by laws, even in practice.
> it has the effect of granting rights by preventing signatories that have subordinated themselves to it from enforcing laws that try to take those rights away
So once a government signs a paper that says X, it can't sign another paper that says not-X? Or alternatively, if a government promises it'll be good, it can't then be bad?
If government A promises to be good, but is bad, will governments B, C and D then invade A to force it to be good? Or will they go give A a stern talking to? Or will they perhaps impose economic sanctions that hurt their own economies too?
You see, signing a law that says a government will be good is nothing but PR, in practice.
If they are actually violating the license terms, the best idea is still to first ask nicely. If they don't comply, you can sue.
"compensation for damage" you can pretty much forget about unless you can prove actual damages.
However, it seems there's something else at play here when you realize Juncker has just started his term as European Comission president, and the TTIP deals going on. It seems fishy that this only appears now and with such fanfare.
Dont forget that germany officially punished Cyprus for doing similar things.
And lets not forget he is not an elected President
Cyprus found itself in a hole with no good geopolitical bargaining chips so they got screwed. All the argumentation that followed was to make the pill easier to swallow for other EU citizen. Like "Look we are screwing them up and it is scary but they are bad guys, so don't worry, that won't happen here."
Nobody is unhappy with Luxembourg right now, so nothing will happen. At best politician in other countries will moan and complain about the various companies involved and maybe build up public outrage to justify extra local taxation.
Are you from the EU? You do know that EU law supersedes national law, right? Or that a number of southern european countries don't have control of their finances for 5+years now?
It's not an inconsequential union.
Also, if they are not doing nothing wrong, then i don't know if the word "wrong" has any uses anymore.
Those southern European countries do have direct control of their own finances. They could declare bankruptcy and start over if they wanted to. When people say they are 'controlled' by Germany or whatever, those people are in a lazy and misleading way saying that those countries preferred to get loans from other countries and submit to those lenders requirements rather than immediately make their spending match their tax revenues ... because borrowing is easier, politically. But that's still a free choice they made.
WRT wrongness, you seem to believe that any country which charges a lower tax rate than any other country is somehow immoral? You want a global government that sets a single tax rate for every person and company on earth? That's one way to avoid people playing jurisdictional arbitrage, but I don't see anyone arguing for that.
Wrt to wrongness, yes, it is wrong that a small country takes advantage of the openness and loopholes of global economies to funnel money in their direction. There is a simple asymmetry at the core that thei exploit: a big democratic country will never be able to lower corporate taxes because the citizens/wealth generators will protest. A tiny dictatorship or otherwise tiny country with no other resources will be able to convince its citizens that a sustainable future can be built by leeching off funneled money made in other countries. To me that is immoral
Or are you suggesting that any of these countries could survive financially with such low tax rates without the foreign money?
PS. With respect to the amount of control over indebted countries government, consider the case of Greece. Yes they could have opted out by voting in a referendum, but when the prime minister proposed to do that he was deposed overnight.
Do you seriously think Luxembourg is actually some kind of third world state that is only doing well because it has low corporation taxes? I think you should review the economies of countries painted as tax havens before concluding that. And of course big democratic countries can lower corporation taxes. If the citizens prefer not to do that, OK, that's their choice, but companies leaving is the expected outcome of that. It's not some kind of immorality on the behalf of other citizens of other countries to exploit that. Unless you're going to paint all Irish people as immoral, for example, which is absurd.
In Australia, IKEA paid 1%* tax over the last 12 years, even as sales surged 500%:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/06/luxembourg-tax-...
(The Guardian article has since removed the 1% reference, though it was in there when I first read the article.)
The EU single market was created to simplify trade across borders in Europe, because that makes everyone wealthier. Imagine if every country had to make everything itself!
Tax is a big part of what makes trade complicated. If you had to file taxes in dozens of different languages, dozens of times, each year to every EU country, it'd be much harder to sell across the single market. So the EU does not require that, you can incorporate once and sell to the whole market. That means, you get to pick where in the EU you incorporate, and as different regions have different levels of taxation .... well, it's no different to freedom of movement for individuals. They can go live somewhere with lower taxes if they want to. The places they didn't choose to live might not like that, but you can't have both simplicity and every government getting to tax everyone else.
going back to other stories, if and when space tourism takes off, whats to stop someone from relocating to orbit and avoiding excessive and at times abusive taxation?
Phasing out corporation tax entirely would be impossible for most countries to do quickly because such a huge part of their budgets come from that. In the UK it's about 25% I believe and the government there is still spending far, far more than it takes in via tax, so losing 25% of that revenue is a non-starter, and making it up with higher personal income taxes would be politically impossible: even if you could prove mathematically it was equivalent or better to do that, people feel very strongly that there exists an "us vs them" relationship between people and companies, where "us" often includes the government. This is despite that most people work for companies, and there's lots of evidence governments should sometimes be in the "them" bucket.
I don't really know where societies go from here with corporation tax - there are so many good arguments against it, but it's sort of like trying to give up smoking. You can argue all you want but lots of countries just aren't going to do it.
The first step would be to get western state finances more balanced though. Once governments aren't ballooning their debt, more complex arguments about taxation become possible to make. Whilst they're all spiralling the drain it's too hard.
As an aside, it's kind of nice to see the government's over-complicated tax code used against them.
A company though, can be split up and spread around, and many modern companies operate almost everywhere and yet nowhere in particular. That's very true of internet companies that don't need any local presence to operate in a country. Additionally they are seen as ideal tax targets by politicians because they can't vote, and are often perceived as "foreign" even if the reality is rather more complex, and people perceive tax on corporations to be free as the price increases that it (theoretically) results in can't be distinguished from general price rises due to inflation.
So we end up in a messy situation that suits nobody. Big companies exploit their trans-national nature to try and get taxed in places that don't really need the money like Luxembourg. Big countries try and exploit their size to extract as much money as possible from the evil foreign capitalists, regardless of where they may actually be based. Companies get taxed without representation and we just sort of ignore this because we feel they can already buy too much influence with politicians anyway, even without them actually getting to vote on anything.
And in the end, governments still don't have enough money.
Economists who study this problem sometimes conclude that the best rate to set corporation tax at is zero; they argue that "dead weight costs" of corporation taxes are very high compared to most taxes and besides, ultimately the costs get passed on to consumers. Of course this ignores the fact that business is global but taxation and voting is still very local. What might make theoretical sense in a textbook rarely seems sensible to the man on the street.
Equating companies with actual people seems to be a uniquely american view (also, complaining about "double taxation" of corporate profits). Personally, I don't think those who pay the tax are those who "deserve" to vote or be represented by politicians/laws. In my view, companies (and their investors) have the privilege of being able to profit by providing services to citizens, and they should pay (be taxed) for this privilege.
Taxation without representation is pretty widely recognised as problematic though. Not for nothing did it help trigger the war of independence against in the colonies against the British. Think about it: if you can't influence politicians in any way, what stops them taxing 100% of your labour? The only thing that stops governments doing this at the moment is the fear of consequences from their citizens: either at the ballot box in democracies or at the hands of the mob in dictatorships. Companies can't vote and they can't rebel, so there has to be some kind of pressure that pushes back against ever higher taxation. Usually this is indirect: countries fear that if they tax companies too much, they'll go bust, people will lose their jobs, and then those people will vote.
But when companies are largely distributed and a government doesn't feel any real exposure via their own population, the natural tendency is to say "if you want to sell to our citizens, you have to pay us lots of tax" and there's not much a company can do about it except simply deny an entire population their services, which is about as useful a response as a person deciding the best way to lower their tax bill is to throw themselves off a bridge. Nobody wins in this situation!
> In my view, companies (and their investors) have the privilege of being able to profit by providing services to citizens, and they should pay (be taxed) for this privilege.
Since when is the ability to make a profit by engaging in trade a "privilege"? People were doing that in the earliest tribes and farming settlements where the closest thing to a government was the local alpha male. The privilege of taxation is one people grant to governments in return for the stability and ability to make long term plans that they provide; but that privilege can be revoked and has been throughout history.
Obviously, but here we're talking about people having no representation - not companies.
> "if you want to sell to our citizens, you have to pay us lots of tax"
No country that I know of demands "lots of tax". Usually, they just want to receive their "fair" share of tax - e.g. 20% on the profits on the products sold in the country/to the citizens. That's not outrageous, and companies still increase their profits by serving the market. Of course, companies and governments might disagree on what is a "fair" tax, but basically, this just means "as much as local companies are paying" (otherwise, being foreign amounts to having an unfair competitive advantage).
> Since when is the ability to make a profit by engaging in trade a "privilege"? People were doing that
People engaging in trade is not a privilege. Companies, however, is! There are many benefits of forming a company, if nothing else the legal structure (profits can be legally distributed in predetermined ways), liability protection, and (probably the most important of all) immortality.
Governments always claim that their tax is "fair", that doesn't mean anything. We have to evaluate fairness ourselves. In this case, what does "fair" mean? People tolerate taxation because they get something back from it. That's it - that's the only reason. It's not because politicians or governments have some natural right to exist, it's because the benefits outweigh the costs (again, in theory, ignoring that no government is even close to perfectly representative).
But what benefits do companies get from the tax they pay? The answer is, very few and nothing on the scale as what people get. Companies don't use roads or schools or hospitals, their employees use those and they already pay tax. Companies can use the courts, but they usually have to pay for that at the point of use, they don't qualify for legal aid or anything like that. They can also benefit from things like copyrights or patents, except these days at least in the tech sector patents seem more of a cost than a benefit. I'd happily opt my company out of that "benefit" if I could. They certainly are not immortal, companies go bust all the time.
Meanwhile, people that can't afford to play the game and make deals with Luxembourg can easily lose out badly in your so-called fair world. A few people form a company and start selling some products. 20% of the sale price goes to the government where the customer was based. But then, in the absence of double taxation treaties, the government where the company is based (if there is a single such place) would take another 20%. Then when the company actually pays the people who did the work, those governments might take another 20-40%.
0.8 * 0.8 * 0.7 (let's say 30% personal income tax) == 0.448, in other words you ended up losing most of the money you earned just to corporation and personal income tax. That's before including things like employment taxes, taxes on property and so on.
This provides a powerful incentive to simply not sell to other countries at all, and this makes everyone poorer. Which is why there are double taxation treaties. But once you have those, you have to accept that other countries will have different opinions about tax and different needs, and trying to slice up the cake will inevitably result in big fights and compromises.
A government, its taxes and the public services it offers (firefighters, courts&police, mandatory vaccination, schooling, etc) are a great solution to a prisoner's dilemma that people face: "Why should I contribute for the fire department, when my neighbors will?" Then, a house somewhere caches fire and the whole city burns down, because no one was willing to pay for a single fire truck.
Then, the question is not, "how much does a single person benefit from a specific service", but more "how much does the society benefit" - everybody benefits a lot - less revolutions, less famine, less epidemic illnesses, less crime. How should we finance this? The answer almost all countries converge to is progressive taxation; it makes sense, really, as those who have the most also have the most to loose. What should we tax? Most countries tax income, sales (VAT), and profits/dividends; also specific goods (e.g. tobacco), capital gains/interest, and property. Most of these are IMO good - sales tax is very progressive (those who have more -> consume more -> pay more tax), tobacco tax discourages smoking (a lot of external costs, especially in countries with public health system), property tax promotes effective use of land and is progressive as well, as are capital gains/interests taxes. Personally, I would reduce income tax, and raise profits/dividend tax (as those who work tend to be poor, those who own tend to be rich), but that's just me.
AFAIK, taxes don't work the way you think they do - sales tax is really VAT, so you don't pay 20% (you only pay 20% of the added value you create, which for most businesses is a much lower percentage of revenue) - also, income tax is applied before tax on profits (employee salary is a cost to the business), and for most people it's quite a bit lower than 30% (i.e. for the poor, those who spend most of their paychecks on basic goods). Tax on profits is in many jurisdictions completely optional - the owners could very easily elect to pay no tax on profits (only tax on dividends, which is in line with income tax), but then they would have unlimited liability. Tax on profits is basically the price of buying limited liability.
I'm not saying there should be no double tax treaties - there should be, of course, but companies should not be able pay less tax on the profits generated within one country, just because taxes in the other country are lower.
Yes tax is often to used to pay for public goods, though fire isn't a perfect example because in some parts of the world actually fire protection is considered a product that you buy from the government and you actually can opt out of it. In that case if your home catches fire the fire fighters will turn up and do only as much work as needed to stop it spreading, but they won't bother trying to save your home:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/04/firefighters-watch-...
That story is pretty brutal, especially if they really did forget to pay the fee and not merely decide to opt out, though it's hard to know after the fact of course. But it is possible and it does happen.
Still, there are lots of other examples of public goods funded via taxation and vaccination is a good one.
One point of terminology confusion here: sales tax and VAT are not the same thing. Sales taxes usually only apply when goods are sold to a consumer at retail. VATs apply at all parts of the supply chain and have rules in place to charge tax only on the value delta. America uses sales tax, I think most other places (and certainly Europe) use VAT. It's very confusing to claim they are the same thing. Additionally sales taxes are not normally described as progressive - it's the opposite, they are considered regressive:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_tax
(see the "effects" section)
... because the rate is the same no matter what your income is. Rich people don't necessarily consume more: they can choose to consume the same amount as poorer people and often do just because many goods are pretty uniform. I.e. rich people tend to use the same smartphones as middle or even lower income people. They don't use smartphones that cost 10,000x as much even if that's how much more they earn.
I'm not saying there should be no double tax treaties - there should be, of course, but companies should not be able pay less tax on the profits generated within one country, just because taxes in the other country are lower.
Companies don't generate profits within a country, they generate sales, and they already pay the local rates of sales tax or VAT. Attempting to bodge this arrangement is why politicians are always screaming about how unfair profit-shifting is, but it's fundamental - how do you define where a profit is made? Deciding where a sale is made is not too hard because you can identify the location of the person who bought the good or service, or where the business is headquartered, but when you add up all the profits from these sales which country gets to help themselves? Consider Google. Is their profit made in California because that's where they were founded and where the brains of the search engine are made? Or Ireland, because that's where the sales people were made? Or Switzerland because there's an office there that contributed a nifty feature that increased profits? How much does each country contribute towards a companies profit? Trying to figure this out is a mugs game, it's entirely arbitrary, which is why companies can game it so easily by having subsidiaries license IP from each other and so on - who can really say what arrangement is correct?
In theory, in the EU, it's simple: profit is booked where the company is headquartered. Same thing for the USA, hence all the companies registered in Delaware, a notorious tax haven. Sometimes you can't arrange things in this way because you need / want to operate outside that trading bloc, this is when you start getting subsidiaries that pay their parent companies huge licensing costs for IP or the brand, but really it's just about moving profits to where the company wants them to be.
Regarding sales tax, I don't see why VAT couldn't be manipulated in the same way. I don't know about other countries, but in Slovenia, books and food/non-alcoholic drinks have a lower VAT, and e.g. expensive cars (actually, those that have low mileage) have extra tax. The only advantage that I see of sales tax is that resale is taxed as well. Which would only obviously apply to big items (houses, cars), but people would avoid it by simply having their companies own these items.
If sales tax were to apply to companies as well (i.e. companies selling stuff to companies), I would oppose it, because it effectively penalizes a long supply chain and encourages monolithic, vertically-integrated companies.
Also companies can't avoid paying sales TAX unlike VAT, and if your company owns a car and gives you it as a perk you have to pay value tax for it, basically it means that the taxable amount of your salary increases by a certain amount even tho you actual salary doesn't.
On the supply chain, well first long supply chains are not good for the end consumer while monopolies are not good either you should not pay for the middle man, especially not for 50 of them. That said the sales tax is only paid for goods that are intend to be used. This means that if i buy nails from you as a vendor i do not pay sales tax because I'm not the end consumer, if i buy nails to make a furniture i pay it because I'm consuming it. The fact that the EU still uses VAT while pretending to spearhead the evolution of human society is still mind boggling.