According to a story today in The Register, The Netherlands is considering new levies on the sale of digital music devices such as the iPod that could amount to $4.30 per gigabyte. (You can do the math of what that amounts to as a tax on a 20, 40, and 60 gig iPod). These fees are collected by a copyright collection agency and are then distributed to labels and artists under the guise of off-setting damages from digital piracy (known as the remuneration right). This concept isn’t new, as we have it to some degree in the US via an old copyright law, and other European nations have explored such taxes as well in modified degrees. As some of my readers may remember, I wrote at length about the remuneration concept in the spring of 2004, looking at the feasibility of adopting such a scheme here for the US. And although I recommended such a scheme a year ago (in a much less drastic form), a year of progress in the digital music market has shown that such a tax would be devasting in curtailing adoption of new technologies, and would clearly displace money that would otherwise go more directly towards the respective rightsholders. Although talk of remuneration rights in the US has mostly been left to the academics, this is an issue that should be very carefully watched by those who oppose its implimentation here. We all know that Congress is a captive audience when the lobbyists come with their bags of cash.