This is *so* Old Europe it makes me want to cry.

The new iPod Nano costs 249 USD in America; 249 Euros in Spain; 249 Euros in Germany; 249 Euros in Belgium;…..and 319 Euros in France!

The reason why is surreal.

It’s because of a tax imposed to compensate rights holders for private copying of their work. Since it’s impossible to know who is copying what and when and in what volumes, Sorecop, which manages the tax, imposes arbitrary assumptions.

(digression: anybody else find it weird, and kind of funny, that Sorecop in English sounds like "sore cop"?)

So the iPod Nano is taxed in the category "dedicated memory device based on flash memory, non-removable, of 4 gigabytes", and therefore taxed at 0,34 Euros per 32 megabyte.

Shame the Nano doesn’t have a hard drive instead of flash memory. In that case it would have been classified as a "device with hard drive of less than 5 gigabytes", and therefore taxed for 8 Euros per unit instead of 50 Euros.

Sorecop, when asked about this, replied that the method of calculating the tax dates from 2001, when flash memory devices were rarely larger than 64 megabytes.

Oh, poor you. As always, technology has galloped ahead to expose the absurd, and frankly, shameful scam that you set-up to extort money from people in the name of "artist’s rights".

Link: (in French) From TF1