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Comment by jkot | Hacker News Reader

This is just UK. I dont think it will fly in Spain, Czech rep or other parts of EU.

For start there is author tax to compensate authors for fair use, it is collected as VAT on empty mediums and printers. With this law many powerful people would loose money. I would welcome it, since it means cheaper hardware.

And secondly: YES! More stupid laws like this, more DRM and people will turn to free music under Creative-Commons like license.

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From the linked text.

> The government's choices are now to remove the private copying exception—making personal copying illegal again, or to supply additional evidence that copyright owners suffer no or minimal “harm” from personal copying, or else to begin imposing a new tax on users to compensate the indust

This is exactly the situation we have in Spain, a tax was created to compensate private copy.

Sure it would fly in Spain

People will just pirate more.

Minor correction, the authors tax charged on printers and copy mediums is in addition to VAT, not the same as VAT.

Minor correction, depends on the eu countries, but in France, the authors tax charged on copy mediums is in addition to the product price without VAT, and then VAT is applied to the whole. So you pay VAT on the authors tax. To be clear you pay tax on tax, a french speciality.

In NL you pay VAT on the special taxes added to fuel and there are a couple of other cases like this. Tax on tax is unfortunately not just a French thing.

uh sure okay.

People will continue to obey copyright laws as closely as ever. right.

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