SC scraps duty on loaded software

Supreme Court has ruled that no excise duty is payable on software loaded on

com-puters. The Excise Depart-ment had argued that opera-tional software was

part of the PC and therefore duty should be paid on the total value of the

computer. The apex court also rejected suggestions from the Department that PCs

with license software should not be compared with a disc, floppy or CD-ROM

available in the mar-ket separately. The three-judge bench headed by Justice

San-tosh Hegde explained that computer and operational soft-ware are different

marketable commodities. The excise duty on computers is 16 percent whe-reas that

on the software is nil.

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