The Last Podcast

TorrentFreak reports that my beautifully flat birth country of the Netherlands is about to ban DRM and legalize filesharing.

While that makes for a great headline, neither is the case. Instead, the “internet spokesperson” of the PVDA (a major Dutch, somewhat leftist party), proposed a tax on internet connections so that the extra money could go to back to the artists (or Buma/Stemra (=Dutch ASCAP/BMI) where it would just disappear, I am sure). Just one politician make a statment to get some traction - no more than that is going on here.

This does have precedent in Europe. There was a time where scanners in Germany were artificially slowed down so that the manufacturer wouldn’t have to pay the tax that was levied on copiers because they were clearly meant to copy copyrighted stuff. Same for blank tapes, though I am not sure about blank CDs and I am not sure the Netherlands did the same thing. (You could override the scanner limitations by using an American driver, by the way…).

Basically, this rule assumes everybody is a criminal, just like the Universal/Microsoft Zune deal assumed everybody is a criminal. Why would my father have to pay a copyright tax if he can hardly use email and skype? Its an idiotic idea from a politician who didn’t have much to say lately. No more than that.

If you read Dutch, here is the original article.

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