Let and be mutually commuting unital C* subalgebras of (). It is shown that and are C* independent if and only if for all natural numbers n, m, for all n-tuples A = (A₁, ..., Aₙ) of doubly commuting nonzero operators of and m-tuples B = (B₁, ..., Bₘ) of doubly commuting nonzero operators of , $Sp(A,B)=Sp\left(A\right)\times Sp\left(B\right)$, where Sp denotes the joint Taylor spectrum.