19 March 2024, Tuesday, 5:17
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Mikhalkov offers to impose tax on access to Internet for Belarusians

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Mikhalkov offers to impose tax on access to Internet for Belarusians

The filmmaker offered to impose a tax on each connection to the Internet on the territory of the Customs Union, author’s fees.

In the near future a Russian filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov is going to propose this project to Russia’s president Vladimir Putin at a meeting behind the closed doors, and he is particularly to ask imposing the tax on Belarus and Kazakhstan, which are members of the Customs Union, a journalist Anton Nosik writes.

The essence of the new tax, which is actively lobbied by the of Mikhalkov’s protégée, Russia’s minister of culture Vladimir Medinsky, is to charge a flat-sum tax on each connection to Internet. Its rate, according to Mikhalkov, should be 25 rubles per month, and according to Medinsky – 300 rubles per year. It is easy to understand that the sum is the same in both cases. Communications service providers should collect them from their clients, and then give either to the Russian Union of copyright holders or to some new organisation which would be created by Mikhalkov for utilizing this tax.

Potentially, it is to be set for distribution of payments among right holders, whose creative products (films, books, music) had been downloaded from the web in the accounting period. In practice, there is no way to keep records of downloads, as well as there is no register of copyright holders of works on the web. As long as it is impossible technically to create accounting based on two unknown variables (whose works had been downloaded and how many times), it means that money is to be allocated according to intuition of a tax collector, not on objective computer data, the blogger writes.

At the same time, as it is usual in the practice of collective leadership, when company details of a right holder are unknown to the management company, it simply pockets right holders’ money.

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