[CUBE] iToungs 4

[Erik Ableson]

An interesting side note here is that I suspect the problem lies less 
in the legal ramifications of the music industry, but rather in the tax 
implications of the various European nationalities.  When I signed on 
(from France) I was able to get the service to work fine since I still 
have a US address credit card from when I lived there.  The interesting 
part is that they properly identified the _county_ I lived in and 
charged me the appropriate sale tax as if I had made this purchase in a 
store in that county.

This is a first that I've seen in online commerce with the ability to 
tie into that many tax jurisdictions and work out the billing rates and 
remittance details. Dealing with the Euro market gets even more 
confusing since they have to decide whether to offer a separate store 
in Euros (and we won't get into the whole price disparity that comes 
from that or the remaining non-Euro currencies still out there) or just 
let people buy in US $, tack on the VAT and work out conversion rates  
- but tax accountants _hate_ that.  Given the current strength of the 
Euro, I hope they go that route or at least recognize the strength of 
the Euro for once and bill it out at 0.99€ VAT included instead of more 
expensive.

Note also that this time even Canadians aren't getting a break even 
though they're right next door.  I think that Steve is using this as a 
model for the future in terms of handling e-commerce taxation which 
explains the strictly US only first pass.  That's an insanely massive 
project completely on top of the scope of the music store itself.  If 
they have built a back end that automatically ties into all of the 
various city and county sales taxes that can be auto-updated they have 
a huge behind the scenes product to market - if they can pull that off 
internationally as well, that's a huge coup.  But it's a lot of work.

Death and taxes folks - we'll never escape :-)