
The business DOES pay the tax, and we are subject to audit, the fun kind of audit where the taxing authority comes in and says 'you owe us one meeeelion dollars' and you have to disprove us.
We charge YOU taxes because WE are responsible for paying them to the government.
Now multiply this by millions of possible variables.
My business, and online retailer, would track all of the sales and use and VAT and blue and green taxes that apply by product type, color and aroma, all this for each of thousands of taxing authorities, and then pay these taxing authorities according to their rules, with supporting documentation, AND we make sure we can survive being audited by all of them.
Side note, a business CAN sell things with the taxes included in the price, if they display this to the purchaser. A good example is a bar, they'll have a sign that says taxes included in the purchase price. If they don't, they can be hit for taxes, again, by an auditor, happens all the time.
I work at a company with 2000 employees, many using mobile clients, with a pretty high turnover rate and a need for long term archiving. We rely on email for almost all of our communication, handling an average of 1,000 messages per hour, peaking at 15k per hour, pushing an average of about 250 kbits per second.
We use a combination of qmail, squirrelmail and Courier IMAP for mail, with our users trained to store older messages locally if they need them past one year.
What benefits (aside from calendaring) would we see from Exchange?
Messages older than a year are stored zipped on a disk array and tape. Since they use Maildir, they are easy as pie to view or restore.
We don't have a geographically different replicant in place, but it wouldn't be difficult to do this at all. We've switched from server to server and archive to archive with a tiny bit of a delay in service.
You're right,
He isn't directly stealing from his bandmates because he isn't making physical copies of the sheet music covered under for PA.
But his deal with Warner likely includes a revenue share. CDs are considered royalty bearing objects, if Lars wants a copy of his own CD, he has to purchase it from his publisher, he can't just have one. The publisher and performer negotiate rates and they're surprisingly high, even though they consider it a wholesale price. The publisher then splits the revenue according to their negotiated deal with the band.
There is hardly a thing in the world that some man can not make a little worse and sell a little cheaper.