Thursday, June 30, 2011

Amazon Associates and California Tax Law Signed in 2011

This is a classic example of "free" money that Governments love to levy on people - tax those who NEVER will get any "benefit" of the tax.
 
Some guesses & some facts:
1. People who live in California must pay use tax (sales) on things THEY buy over the Internet - that has not changed (lots of states had these laws long before the Internet was even invented. They just enforce them more now.)
2. Amazon Associates paid INCOME tax on the income they earned. Income is income so there is no income "tax" loss at all. (Now there will be.)
3. Amazon / Associates did not collect sales taxes - but see #1 above - the USERS who live in California were ALREADY required to report purchases and remit those taxes to California ANYWAY.
4. The law, as much as I can tell, would require ANY sale made through a link on any web page by someone who lives in California to collect sales tax on that item REGARDLESS of where it was shipped from or who it was shipped to. If a person went to Amazon via a link on a web page (regardless of where that page was served from) lived in Texas, shipped to as a gift to someone in Florida, the Associate would HAVE to collect Calif sales that since they consider THEM to have sold the item - and thus told Amazon that to make the collection easier for the State of California Amazon must collect sales taxes because the associate lived in California.
 
This is easily seen to be way outside the limits of the purview of the states to tax people from OTHER states and interfering with commerce - which is the sole domain of the Federal side. Since the people in the OTHER states would be paying sales tax to California even though they do not live there.
 
Nothing in law is ever settled - people (judges) can - and do - overturn 100 or even 500 year old laws. It is what they think a law means and their interpretation and precedent is thrown away. The Federal judge that said that taking private land from one person, paying the owner some value, then selling it to another private person (company) so that a higher tax can be generated by doing so to the government is in the public good - is Constitutional.
 
If my above 4 points are correct - the ONLY thing that Amazon could do - asides from rewriting their base code to account for every state exception and comply with all the different taxing authorities in California to figure out the sales tax and collect from EVERYONE regardless of where they live in the USA  - OR internationally --  was to wipe out the Associates program to avoid all this complexity.
 
How would someone in Germany get a refund from California of sales taxes paid automatically and added to their bill because they bought an item from seeing a  web link on a page who lives in California?
 

 
 

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Too many Safety features can lead to disaster

Too many "aids" will clutter a person's ability to pay attention and make decisions. If you have to act on each "aid" to decide if it is really important to you right at that point in time - and recognizing the one important item out of a flood of aids warning you of multiple issues - it then becomes distracting and people will learn to ignore them or usually just turn them off.
Like the UAC that came with VISTA - too many times it bothered people to do the simple things so people quickly learned how to turn it completely off. Too many "false negatives" and people will distrust it. That has always been the case for any type of technological aids to a task.
There are great videos of people going into landing with an ear wrenching warning alarm going off in the cockpit that they turn off or simply ignore since it was distracting them from concentrating on the landing . Course it was the landing gear warning sound that the gear was UP!

A Conversation Spock should have had in a Star Trek Movie

Kirk: Spock, how did you come up with such an illogical solution to the problem?
 
Spock: After being around humans all these years, the illogical solution seemed like the logical answer.

Tuesday, June 07, 2011

DRM Issues Never Asked by Congress

Stop and ask "Why does CRM exist?" - Because governments - people whom we elected - can EASILY hold COMPANIES who publish works electronically responsible for violation of copyrights. Thus DRM was created so that the COMPANIES cannot be held responsible for someone re-publishing copyrighted works. Businesses impose DRM to avoid liability and the consumers - who elected these people who we then never hold accountable - passed the laws which in turn imposed DRM on ourselves!
 
DRM has REAL long term issues. Now most items created just NOW under copyright will not expire anywhere for 75 to possible 170 YEARS from now. Are these SAME companies going to go around and remove the DRM in all the CDs / DVDs / Players etc when they are no longer under copyright?  Starting next year some 1927 items are no longer under copyright - if they were published electronically are the companies that created them  going to electronically remove the DRM or give you a NEW copy without DRM on it? Are they going to notify people as DRM materials they purchased drop off and be given a new copy?
 
50 years from now when you put in that DVD you just bought today can you skip all the ads about Harry Potter #6 being out on DVD before #7 comes out in July? (Now I wish they DID put in prices for them in their advertisements - 50 years from now buying Harry Potter for $16.95 will be a real bargain.)
 
All the people creating DRM for electronic distribution don't care or even plan for the expiration of copyright at all. It is there FOREVER. Permanently burned into the electronic and physical media.
 
Like a lot of things governments do - this whole DRM item too was not thourghly thought out by legislatures at all and the problems created and any solutions that it created was just pushed off till later. They completely ignored (really never even asked or wanted to) about the unintended consequences of the laws passed (and still being passed).