In what legislators are calling an attempt to “bring old legislation into the 21st century”, the Portuguese parliament is considering taxation on storage devices, in an attempt to protect copyright holders.
According to one local media outlet, Exame Informatica, the 'minor' legislative update proposed by the Portuguese Socialist Party (currently in the opposition) in Portugal, would have consumers forking out for a new tax on storage devices, all in the name of copyright protection - yet all but killing off HDD sales in the country.
The proposal would have consumers paying an extra €0.2 per gigabyte in tax, almost €21 extra per terabyte of data on hard drives. Devices with storage capacities in excess of 1TB would pay an aggravated tax of 2.5 cents per GB. That means a 2TB device will in fact pile on €51.2 in taxes alone (2.5 cents times 2048GB). External drives or “multimedia drives” as the proposed bill calls them, in capacities greater than 1TB, can be taxed to the tune of 5 cents per gigabyte, so in theory, a 2TB drive would cost an additional €103.2 per unit (5 cents times 2048GB). This would be enough to singlehandedly stall PC and component sales. Let’s not even consider the ongoing effects of the flooding in Thailand. We won’t even attempt a parody at formatted capacity vs. raw capacity.
Ironically, under the original format of the bill, hard-drives under the capacity of 150GB are exempt of this tax. Of course, the odds of finding anything on sale below 160GB is unlikely these days, unless it’s an SSD, a sort of grey area for this bill.
USB pens and memory cards will be taxed at 6 cents to the gigabyte, while internal storage on mobile phones and other similar storage devices will be charged 50 cents to the gigabyte. Yes, your 64GB iPhone would become €32 more expensive.
Copy devices would also be affected by this legislation: photocopiers and multi function printers would also be taxed according to the number of pages copied per minute, with a 70 ppm MFP being charged up to €227 more per device.
In Portugal, storage devices like DVDs and CDs pay a 3 percent fixed surtax, besides VAT, as a sort of penalty for being copyright violation enablers.
A Socialist Party parliamentarian was quoted as having said that home users would not feel the pinch as the tax was aimed at professionals who use larger capacity drives.
This is not an isolated case of legislative numbnuttery. It now seems to run rampant in the current Portuguese legislature, what with new taxation being created left right and centre, in an attempt to stave off another 'Greece'.
One recent and particularly obvious money grab was the creation of electronic tolls on motorways leading into neighbouring Spain, which not only peeved the locals when going about their daily business, but also annoyed Spaniards who were not made fully aware of the implications, and were unable to pay in any fashion other than standing in very long queues for hours on end.
When the cauldron is being stirred, it does not matter whether the trapped are going clockwise or anti-clockwise, oka "For" or "Against", the end result will still be a feast for The Stirrer. And notice how the advertising department lures the egotisticals, oka the saviours, or the conditioned, oka the worshippers, with hints of "backwardness" as in some archaic law requiring modernisation by airy-fairies and their Fathering Mothers/Mothering Fathers. Isn't it grand that when "The Exchequer" taxes tobacco, say, only the [poor] addicts are funding the show just like "Pensioners" are now funding their greed of voting for the same creatures they'd hoped will gift them a few extra lollies. And the democraticos have the gall to finger-point at unsophisticated natives and their vote-rigging/vote-buying.
Devolution has neither Rhyme nor Reason for what It does or what It is, and Evolution is beyond Rhyme & Reason but that dual natured know-eet-all called the human being will be rhyming and reasoning beyond The End if he could. This is because humans accept others as self when all one has to do is, "Don't do it", as opposed to, "Don't get caught". Well, all will be caught, like it or not, as "Taxation" marches to "Credit's" tune - and vice-versa. Time to demand more "wages" then, oka "Index Linked", because "Sin" needs to be paid - by the "blacks", "the deprived", "the dirty ones who won't do a day's work", and all because the lucky ones have taken what work from the unlucky ones through the mechanism of their sky-high wage demands that mostly do not commensurate with their output - the duty of "Taxation & Credit" being to turn the "Democraticos" into beggars-cum-thieves as they demand more wages to pay for their sins of "holidays", "concerts", gadgetries, drugs, whores, pimps, popes, churches, royalty, and the myriad of insanities taken as sanity - invisibly funded by the other end of The Zero Sum.
At this rate, Devolution might realise Armageddon before The Apocalypse arrives to take Him and His Tentacles back to where they belong together with their Tag-Alongs clinging on for dear life as their accumulations dig deeper for better traction/company. A dark picture indeed. Should it be mumbo-jumbo, there's only a nutter on the loose but should it be true, there isn't enough space to accommodate all the nutters running amok or stoned in the Physical Cosmos. What The Bookie and/or His Tentacles do is merely to inform others about errors, it is not for promoting those errors through a process of judgement calls if only because almost all have no real means of judging others when they have yet to really judge themselves, the duty of Destruction being to inform and not for those lacking absolute valuation to [fall into the trap of] becoming a part of Devolution. As such, what "Taxation & Credit" is doing or do is merely a reflection of the state of their victims'/audience's condition, "Evil" being one's ignorance-conspiracy and not others'. Neutralise the same within and in collectivity, the problem will be neutralised, freedom being a measure of one's state of maturity and not what others gave us or what we take from others. And it does not matter how many will realise their reality because when The SS Humanity is sinking, only the salvageable matters and not what Sympathy/Cunning-Cruelty demands. This is because when Need is ignored to satiate Want, it is merely Insanity posing as Sanity because Want is not satiable [generally/in-reality]. When The Child is suckling the Mother to death, even Mommy has to give it a second thought if only because The Child then is not so.