Amazon Prevails In State Sales Tax Dispute, Thus Far 171
snsh writes "A US judge has ruled for Amazon.com (PDF) against North Carolina's request to turn over the names of its customers to state tax officials. The ruling was focused on privacy grounds, so the state can still re-request less detailed sales data which does not identify items purchased."
Reader arbitraryaardvark adds a link to The Volokh Conspiracy's take on the decision.
Re:Wait! Don't tech companies love Big Brother? (Score:5, Interesting)
Huh.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I must be mis-reading this..
As far as I can tell, all that has been ruled is that the state should not receive a lit of -what- books you have purchased.
Nothing to prevent them knowing the value of the books you have purchased, with the titles redacted, so you can pay your fair share of taxes like the rest of us.
Yet people here seem to be discussing things off at a tangent to this (like whether books should be taxed at all, a totally different subject really), who would have imagined Slashdotters doing that ;-)
Re:Good for us Sellers (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed. One of the more bizarre laws the US has that seems certain to incite continual negaitve feelings towards a government you can never participate in.
Utterly stupid
A Little More Complicated Than That... (Score:4, Interesting)
You are correct that things have gotten off topic, and a lot of people are missing what's actually going on here; however, it's not as simple as giving purchases with titles redacted...
Amazon is being sued to pay the taxes for purchases in North Carolina, not for everyone in America. They furnished NC's Department of Revenue (DOR) a list of all sales with ASINs (Amazon's Unique Identifier for products) from 2003 - 2010. NC needs the details because different kinds of products have different sales taxes. NC's DOR demanded that Amazon also provide the Bill-To and Ship-To information, which Amazon refused to do as this would violate the First Amendment by identifying the details of what NC residents were reading, watching, and listening to.
This is where it gets hazy... The DOR offered to give the original data back in exchange for data that identified people, but not the details of what they purchased, but the original data would be kept on the DOR Secretary's computer, because they needed some of that for... I dunno, it's hazy legalese. Amazon stated that the only way they have to identify what was purchased was ASINs, which would identify the products, so no deal.
The DOR admitted that this customer-identifying data would add nothing to establishing Amazon's tax-liability, but they still wanted it. Amazon got backing by the ACLU and the Judge ruled against the DOR.
This should be case-closed, but, as a resident of North Carolina, I'll be keeping an eye on it, and will be writing an irate letter to the editor of my local paper for not covering this story. Thanks Slashdot!
Re:Good for us Sellers (Score:5, Interesting)
Which is a bald-faced lie. Fully automatic weapons require a Federal Firearms License, which overrides any more permissive state law regarding them.
Unless you're referring to a semi-automatic rifle that shares parts with an AK-47? If so, then why should you have to show an ID?
Re:Good for us Sellers (Score:5, Interesting)
Absolutely.
I host an online store for a friend - she used to set up booths at conventions and such but due to health reasons, she is now completely online. (used to do mail order too as it was a niche product, but nobody does mail order anymore). She's having enough trouble just complying with PCI standards. She freaked out when she first saw the questionnaires and I had to spend quite a bit of time going through it and explaining what was meant and spent a lot of time tweaking server and application to meet the PCI standard (it asks for mostly common sense stuff, but is worded with some absolutes that mean that a technically secure compensating measure doesn't qualify you to answer YES/NO to a given question, but I digress)
The point is that she's a friend and I essentially put in quite a few billable hours pro-bono. However, PCI compliance was a walk in the park compared to what we'd have to do should she be required to deal with all those tax jurisdictions you mentioned. She would not be able to afford it with her sales and I'm at my limit (even with a friend) for how much time I'm willing/able to give away.
I custom wrote her shopping cart and checkout system, and before anyone says it, at the time I wrote it, there was NOTHING available on the market that met her needs and she could afford.
YES we could probably rebuild her site using something commercial or FOSS today, but she still can't afford what it would cost to do the conversion. In my opinion, such a complex mess of tax jurisdictions would force mom and pop type places offline or force them to pay big vendors for their carts/checkouts.
That might not seem like the end of the world, but it feels like yet another barrier to entry... over time, the more regulatory and statutory hurdles businesses and individuals have to negotiate in order to go online will destroy a lot of the freedom and openness that made the Internet so fertile a place for speech and innovation in the first place.