The French PM wants net firms such as Google, Yahoo and Facebook to pay more tax in his country in order to boost online sales of books, movies and music.
A new report, commissioned by Nicolas Sarkozy's government, suggests that taxing Google's content heavier would generate funds that could be channelled towards ways of encouraging legal, commercial downloads of content and discouraging the growing problem of online copyright theft.
France has recently introduced a hard-line 'three strikes and you are out' rule in order to deal with online piracy, although that law has still to be finalised.
Patrick Zelnik, the founder of the French PM's wife's record label, and one of the brains behind the report, wants to see the idea taken on board both in France and across the EU.
Tax needn't be taxing
Google is not a big fan of paying tax in Europe, with Olivier Esper, senior policy manager for Google France telling the BBC:"We don't think introducing an additional tax on internet advertising is the right way forward as it could slow down innovation.
"The better way to support content creation is to find new business models that help consumers find great content and rewards artists and publishers for their work."
Via News.bbc.co.uk
Your comments (2) Click to add a new comment
simontmv
January 27th 2010
2. France do appear to be out of touch with many of the ways they are trying to control the way people use the Internet. It seems that they are going the wrong way about it.
This article from the Music Void is interesting http://bit.ly/5ppRAu
Alert a moderator
boboberg
January 10th 2010
1. France is completely out of step with the rest of the world with its "3 strikes you're out" policy that allows the government to deny internet access to people they think may be pirates. First of all internet access is not a privilege it's a human right that the government can't interfere with. Secondly the entire culture is moving in the direction of less copyright protection and into the realm of "all data is free". This kind of law would never be tolerated in the USA. People would be burning down internet service providers. Mark Montgomeryu boboberg@nyc.rr.com
Alert a moderator
Tell us what you think
You need to Log in or register to post comments