iPod tax 'could be on the way'

With the music industry making a lot of noise of late about how music pirates are sending them towards poverty, record labels' coffers look set to receive a boost with the news that there could soon to be an anti-piracy tax on iPods.

The Dutch government is being lobbied on the subject and a rights holders group, Stichting de ThuisKopie, has floated a plan that will see a 'tax' put on MP3 players and hard drives, to be paid to artists and producers.

The Stichting de ThuisKopie foundation denies that it has set a limit for how much the tax will be but reports in the Dutch press put the tariff at €3.28 per gigabyte of storage.

For a 60GB iPod Photo, such a tax would put the price up from €469 to €665 and even the dainty iPod Shuffle would see its price rise by 2.2 per cent.

The Netherlands already charges similar levies on DVDs and blank CDs - some €0.40 to €0.60 for the former and €0.14 for the latter.

Schemes to tax recordable media which could be used to store pirated material have already won favour in other European countries.

Fujitsu-Siemens was recently subject to a German court case which saw the PC maker forced to make a contribution of €12 per user to a rights holders' organisation.

An earlier attempt in France to pass a law to hold computer manufacturers responsible for their users' piracy failed, although levies are in place on other recordable storage media, such as blank tapes and videos.