Get ready to pay 15% tax everytime you’re downloading movies and TV shows from foreign sites

Remember those days you could download anything and everything from any site you wished to? Well, unfortunately that’s going to come to an end.

Beginning December 1, everytime you download music, movies or an e-book from an overseas site or even buy some storage on a cloud from an overseas service provide, you’ll need to pay 15% of service tax on top of your bill.

Apparently movies provided for download by domestic suppliers already incur this service tax. On the other hand, until now the tax wouldn’t apply to an overseas supplier if the customer is an individual, government, local body or government agency based in India.

The only way any overseas supplier would incur such a tax was if it was a B2B transaction with a customer based in India.

However, the Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC) on November 9 amended the Place of Provisions of Specific Rules (PPSR) FOR ‘online information and database access or retrieval services.’

The bulk of the amendment included the change in the definition of ‘place of provision of service.’ Until now, if service providers were outside India, the place of provision of the service recipent was also counted to be outside India and hence there would be no tax deducted.

That will change from December 1, when the place of provision of the service will be counted as the location of the service recipient, thus impacting your bill.

So we'd say, think before you download?

Image credit: Indiatimes