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Sunday, June 22, 2003 |
EU ENDS FREE INTERNET TAX RIDE (ZDNET, 9 June 2003) -- They've survived the bursting of the tech bubble, a global economic downturn and the occasional virus, but now overseas Internet retailers may see their European profit push derailed by one of the oldest drags on business: tax. On July 1, a new EU directive goes into effect requiring all Internet companies to account for value added tax, or VAT, on "digital sales." The law adds a 15 percent to 25 percent levy on select Internet transactions such as software and music downloads, monthly subscriptions to an Internet service provider and on any product purchased through an online auction anywhere in the 15-member bloc of nations. The VAT is nothing new for some Net companies. European dot-coms have been charging customers VAT since their inception. Their overseas rivals, though, have been exempt, making foreign companies an obvious choice for the bargain-hunting consumer. "It's a massive competitive disadvantage. It's good to see at last it being eroded," said David Melville, general counsel of U.K. ISP Freeserve, a division of French ISP Wanadoo. Freeserve has lobbied furiously for the past two years to get the loophole closed, saying its chief rival, AOL U.K., the Internet unit of AOL Time Warner, saved $249.7 million in tax payments over the years. VAT variations The affected companies are handling the new tax load in a variety of ways. AOL Europe has relocated its continental headquarters to tiny Luxembourg, one of the EU's cheaper tax regimes. Seattle-based retailer Amazon.com said the new tax regime will affect its auctions, plus marketplace and zShops operations where third-party new and used items are sold. In addition, VAT will now be charged on software downloads and the sale of e-books, Amazon said. "We'll go out shortly to our seller community about how these changes will impact fees we currently charge," Amazon spokeswoman Patricia Smith said. Online auctioneer eBay will swallow the VAT charge on behalf of consumers in a host of its smaller European operations such as France and Italy. But in the United Kingdom and Germany, its largest and most profitable European units, the company has raised fees to reflect the higher VAT charges. Analysts say the new tax could dent sales in the short term, a blow for American dot-coms such as eBay and Amazon that are banking on higher growth in their overseas business.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-1014519.html and
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36150-2003Jun9.html
http://www.euractiv.com/cgi-bin/cgint.exe/?204&OIDN=1505680&-tt=me
8:16:41 PM 
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GERMANY -- DATE OF E-MAIL RECEIPT (Baker & McKenzie E-Law Alert, 9 June 2003) -- According to the Regional Court of Nuremberg-Fuerth, an e-mail is deemed to have been received [^] in a business context [^] on the day it reaches an electronic mailbox. Upon receipt, the user of the respective business e-mail address bears the risk of loss or delay due to such things as vacation absence. http://www.bmck.com/elaw/DisplayAlertbyID.asp?AlertID=31393
8:14:46 PM
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This kind of outcome make lots of work for lawyers, but it's very expensive for those who want to capitalize on the net's potential.
MASS. COULD BE FIFTH STATE TO ADOPT ANTI-UCITA LAW (Computerworld, 4 June 2003) -- A Massachusetts legislative committee held a hearing this week on an anti-UCITA bill, and the state could become the fifth to enact a law whose sole purpose is to protect its residents and businesses from the controversial software licensing law. The hearing underscores the difficulties that have confronted backers of the Uniform Computer Information Transaction Act (UCITA). Only two states, Virginia in 2001 and Maryland in 2000, have enacted the model legislation, whereas four states have adopted anti-UCITA measures. UCITA's progress toward state-by-state adoption appears to be stalled. John McCabe, an official at the Chicago-based National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL), said a UCITA adoption bill is pending in the District of Columbia, but that's it. With state legislatures generally winding down for the year, the District of Columbia is "the only expectation that we have at this point," he said. http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/story/0,10801,81812,00.html
"SUPER-DMCA" DIES IN COLORADO, SLOWS IN OTHER STATES (Steptoe & Johnson[base ']s E-Commerce Law Week, 31 May 2003) -- Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No . . . it's "super-DMCA", and Colorado Governor Bill Owens has shot it down. Owens vetoed Colorado's mini-version of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) on May 21, dealing the first major blow to proponents of these state-level piracy bills. The "super-DMCA" trend is a state initiative led predominately by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). The problem is that the MPAA's lawyers, in their enthusiasm for the most sweeping possible protection, chose language that criminalizes a wide range of ordinary Internet activity. The heart of the law is the provision making it illegal to "deliver, offer to deliver, or advertise an unlawful telecommunications access device" while "knowing or having reason to know that the devices are intended to . . . receive . . . decrypt, transmit, retransmit, acquire, intercept any telecommunications service without the express authority or actual consent of the telecommunications service provider." A revised bill proposed by MPAA goes some way toward addressing concerns expressed by technologists, mainly by requiring that any prosecution (and, presumably, any civil litigant) prove that actions covered by the bill were committed with specific intent to defraud the service provider in question. But the revised bill does not offer the extensive immunities contained in the federal DMCA for those who provide Internet access; nor does it restrict the private right of action that is most likely to cause problems for legitimate businesses. http://63.104.208.130/WebDoc.NSF/Law+&+The+Net+All/E-Commerce+Law+Week,+Issue+252?OpenDocument
8:12:53 PM
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TIVO TO SELL CUSTOMER VIEWING DATA (AP, 2 June 2003) -- TiVo Inc., the company whose digital video recorders were recently praised as "God's machine" by Federal Communications Commission chairman Michael Powell, is hoping to profit from its omniscience. The leading maker of digital video recorders on Monday began offering advertisers and broadcasters second-by-second information on the television commercials and shows its users are watching - or skipping. As in TiVo's previous audience-measurement projects - it found that the Pepsi ad featuring Britney Spears during the 2002 Super Bowl was the most watched commercial - TiVo executives said they will be gathering information only in aggregate, such as by ZIP code. The habits of individual users will remain anonymous.
8:09:33 PM
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JUDGE DISMISSES SUIT AGAINST GOOGLE (CNET, 30 May 2003) -- A federal judge this week granted Google's motion to dismiss a suit that alleged the company manipulated search results in its powerful Web index. U.S. District Court Judge Vicki Miles-LaGrange on Tuesday denied a motion for a preliminary injunction brought by SearchKing, an Oklahoma City-based Web hosting and advertising network that claimed Google unfairly removed links to its site and those of its partners from the index, causing financial losses. The judge dismissed the case on the grounds that Google's formula for calculating the popularity of a Web page, or "PageRank," constitutes opinions protected by the First Amendment. "PageRanks are opinions--opinions of the significance of particular Web sites as they correspond to a search query," according to the decision filed in the U.S. Western District Court of Oklahoma. "The court simply finds there is no conceivable way to prove that the relative significance assigned to a given Web site is false," the decision said. "Accordingly, the court concludes Google's PageRanks are entitled to full constitutional protection." http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-1011740.html
8:01:21 PM
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© Copyright 2003 Noel D. Humphreys.
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