EU Court Rules E-Books Are Services, Not Goods
1–10 of 78 posts
Re: EU Court Rules E-Books Are Services, Not Goods
#2Paywalled
Re: EU Court Rules E-Books Are Services, Not Goods
#3paywall
Re: EU Court Rules E-Books Are Services, Not Goods
#4Go here: https://www.google.com/#safe=off&q=eu-court-rules-e-books-ar...
Click on the first link that leads to wsj.
Re: EU Court Rules E-Books Are Services, Not Goods
#5Is it, strictly speaking, possible to pirate a service?
Re: EU Court Rules E-Books Are Services, Not Goods
#6Is it, strictly speaking, possible to pirate a service?
Strictly speaking, "piracy" means something involving international boundaries, planes/ships, and violence or coercion...
But seriously (and colloquially) "piracy" is still not specific enough if you're asking a legal question.
Do you mean only plain copyright infringement?
Unlicensed use of spectrum with "pirate radio"?
Secretly re-selling portions of you phone's data plan via tethering?
Bypassing electricity-meters and wiring your house up to the grid directly?
...Abusing a promotional offer that says "one massage per person"?
Re: EU Court Rules E-Books Are Services, Not Goods
#7The basic ruling is that e-books are 'electronic services' and not goods, as a paper book would be. Therefor, France and Luxembourg must apply their standard Value-Added Tax (VAT) of 20% and 17% respectively instead of the lower rate used for paper-backed books of 5.5% and 3% respectively. EU law states that reduced rates for specific categories can only apply to goods, not services.
The countries as well as companies like Amazon will push to allow the lower VAT to be applied to ebooks.
Re: EU Court Rules E-Books Are Services, Not Goods
#8Is it, strictly speaking, possible to pirate a service?
The product/service distinction is orthogonal to the relevant category in (U.S.) copyright law: the work. Only "works" can be copyrighted, but a work can be provided as part of a service, sold as a product, or one of any number of other possibilities. Nice try though. :)
Re: EU Court Rules E-Books Are Services, Not Goods
#9Seeing how these days you're effectively "renting" any cloud-based DRM-enabled digital content, I think it makes more sense for them to be called services for which you get a "license to use" indefinite (i.e. limited, for as long as the deal vendor/publisher is in place) period of time.
Re: EU Court Rules E-Books Are Services, Not Goods
#10Richard Stallman warned us about this kind of thing: he warned us and we laughed.