Richard Stallman warned us about this kind of thing: he warned us and we laughed.
What did he warn us, and who laughed?
EU Court Rules E-Books Are Services, Not Goods
11–20 of 78 posts
Re: EU Court Rules E-Books Are Services, Not Goods
#12[deleted]
Re: EU Court Rules E-Books Are Services, Not Goods
#13The 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 companie…
As an extra tidbit of information: Luxembourg was already violating EU rules for having a VAT percentage of less than 5%.
Re: EU Court Rules E-Books Are Services, Not Goods
#14[deleted]
Re: EU Court Rules E-Books Are Services, Not Goods
#15Makes sense for Amazon's store, where your books live in the cloud and you download some of them locally if you want.
Doesn't make sense if you are provided an .epub file to download.
Re: EU Court Rules E-Books Are Services, Not Goods
#16While short term, this sucks, I also think that in the way that eBooks work these days, this ruling is actually fair and it might well fix the situation for us consumers in the mid- to longer term.
For all intents and purposes, eBooks are services. Between DRM, vendor lock-in and other consumer hostile "features" of ebooks, seeing them as services and consequently taxing them as services totally makes sense.
As an ebook publisher, you can't have it both ways. You can't ask for the lower VAT of the easily lendable and copyable books and at the same time rent out a product that has none of these "drawbacks".
What will come out of this long-term is much more user friendly ebooks.
Re: EU Court Rules E-Books Are Services, Not Goods
#17Is it, strictly speaking, possible to pirate a service?
Re: EU Court Rules E-Books Are Services, Not Goods
#18While short term, this sucks, I also think that in the way that eBooks work these days, this ruling is actually fair and it might well fix the situation for us consumers in the mid- to longer term. For all intents and purposes, eBooks are services. Between DRM, vendor lock-in and other consumer hostile "features" of ebooks, seeing them as services and consequently taxing them as services totally makes sense. As an eb…
I don't think you appreciate the impact. Services are something you lease and use for a specific period and you never own. This seems at least to be an affirmation that ebooks cannot ever be owned by anyone but the publisher and there will now need to be legal mechanisms for revocation of ebooks from your device and reporting and even penalizing and prosecution of anyone who prevents revocation or even simply does not delete a book that is a service and therefore possibly being used illicitly.
Re: EU Court Rules E-Books Are Services, Not Goods
#19Richard Stallman warned us about this kind of thing: he warned us and we laughed.
I'm trying to understand what has to do the VAT class with anything Stallman has said
Re: EU Court Rules E-Books Are Services, Not Goods
#20The 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 companie…
As an extra tidbit of information: Luxembourg was already violating EU rules for having a VAT percentage of less than 5%.
Ireland even has a 0% rate on books according to wikipedia.
Lower than 5% tax rates seem to be pretty common: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_value_added_tax#...