7 ms·

And 100% of Danes, Swedes and Norwegians, regardless age, pay pre-emptive "copying fees" on every piece of storage medium they buy no matter what they intend to

And 100% of Danes, Swedes and Norwegians, regardless age, pay pre-emptive "copying fees" on every piece of storage medium they buy no matter what they intend to use it for. You should never feel guilty for downloading some MP3s or whatever. A little bit of extra information in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36756675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36756675

mulmen 3y ago
Wait what? Really? In that case why not pirate your content? You already paid for it.
- Aachen 3y ago
  > why not pirate your content? You already paid for it Because you didn't pay for the content. Assuming it's analogous to the Dutch law, the tax compensates lost income from you being able to store publicly broadcast copyrighted materials, such as music on the radio or movies shown on TV. That's why it is taxed on storage devices and varies per device type. You haven't gotten a license on every piece of music, software, and movie in existence. That would be great lol, I'd sign up for that tax. Essentially, that's what Netflix was for movies until Disney etc. decided they wanted not to participate and now we wonder why piracy hasn't died
  - mulmen 3y ago
    If storage devices contain a punitive charge for piracy then you did already pay for it. Why pay for a subscription if you already paid the fine?
    - Aachen 3y ago
      Punitive money goes into the government's general funds ("algemene middelen", not sure if there's an internationally correct legal term). This money, instead, goes to copyright holders. The amount is set to cover minor household use, like copying from a friend or a broadcast. It's not to absolve you from copyright law as an individual altogether and make you never have to pay for a movie in your life If that's what you want, parliament is the assembly you will want to talk to, but I'm afraid that they're bound by international treaties and, even if not, the height of the tax that absolves you of all copyright ever would be more than you're willing to pay
      - mulmen 3y ago
        That's fucking insane. Like, what? What if the drive isn't used to store any copywritten material ever? What if I use it to store my own log files or literally anything I want because it's none of your damn business? How is this fee distributed? How do I get a cut of this content creator reimbursement money for myself?
        Aachen 3y ago
        Tell me about it :) I'm just explaining how the law works in my understanding (and, interestingly, not getting any upvotes for it. Usually accurate comments are upvoted but then, usually, people don't disagree with the law. People don't like this messenger!), not saying I agree with it
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        TeMPOraL 3y ago
        It's pragmatic. It's a pseudo-tax paid in order to cut out some space for fair use within copyright regulations (including international copyright treaties), while getting IP owners and distributors to shut up about "lost revenue from piracy". In some sense, this is a rent extracted by large IP holders, and consumers are getting the short end of the deal just as much as the artists. But arguably it's also a bureaucracy-minimizing and thus cost-minimizing approach at country scale: the alternative to a flat fee paid by some amount of commercial entities (and passed onto buyers through prices of hardware), would likely be dealing with individual-level enforcement, lawsuits targeting individuals and/or some other high-maintenance mess, all ultimately paid for by the taxpayer anyway.
        mulmen 3y ago
        It’s pragmatic in the same way as negotiating with terrorists is pragmatic. It’s an exploitable philosophy.
  - JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 3y ago
    > Because you didn't pay for the content I'm in France and you do actually pay for it through this tax since all the income goes to a private company like the RIAA.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Only if you paid the people who own the content.
  - mulmen 3y ago
    Maybe I misunderstand but it sounds to me like there's some additional charge on storage devices that includes the cost of piracy ("copying"). Which means you did pay for it in the sense that you paid the fine for piracy. Building a piracy fee into storage devices is an incentive to pirate because you already paid for it. Why pay the fine for piracy and also pay for the content legitimately?
    - martin8412 3y ago
      The fee is for legal copying. Let's say you've bought a DVD and want a copy for your family vacation home. You can make a copy of that legally. That's what the fee covers. Something I've never done and will probably never do. I also don't know of anyone who ever has. The fee should completely go away in the age of streaming services, but I doubt rights holders agree.
      - mulmen 3y ago
        Why would I pay a fee to legally copy something? What if I don't copy any content on that drive ever and I use it purely to store my original creations? Why would the fee be built in to the storage device and not the original content price? This makes zero sense to me.
        martin8412 3y ago
        It doesn't make any sense. To make it even worse, you also pay the fee on the internal storage of smartphones.
        mulmen 3y ago
        How can that be a thing?!
- madsbuch 3y ago
  As you can see, more than 50% of Danes already do. Being a Dane myself, my impression is that it is less stigmatised in Denmark than in other countries.
  - cabalamat 3y ago
    As far as I can tell it isn't stigmatised in the UK. Or at least no-one has ever told me I'm a bad person for copying stuff.
  - mulmen 3y ago
    Around the turn of the century my family went from dialup to cable. It felt like a waste to not use all the bandwidth all the time. I had a surplus server running Windows 2000 and Kazaa, Limewire, and maybe more. I think I missed Napster. That was a completely normal thing among all my IT literate friends. My rig was kinda anemic. A buddy of mine had four 250gb hard drives. A whole ~terabyte~ of storage. And a liquid cooled AMD. I put a mod chip in my Xbox and brought it to school where we watched (pirated) Monty Python in English class. All this to say it was normalized in the US. I don't think it is stigmatized even today. More like we had about a decade of streaming services actually providing good value. But now the product managers and UX designers have their hooks so deep in it that it's becoming unusable.
  - daneel_w 3y ago
    Same in Sweden. Nobody really feels guilty over doing it, and nobody judges others for doing it, because the laws permitting private copying blur the lines so to speak. But that said, by my feeling most Swedes would agree that running an actual piracy outlet of some sort holds an entirely different "sociomoral" tone because of really being illegal.
- daneel_w 3y ago
  Yep, really. We've been subjected to this at least since the 80s. The original name of the legal framework was "kassettavgift" (cassette fee), obviously targeted at sales of cassette tapes. From there it went on to also afflict VHS tapes, Minidiscs, CD/DVD recordables, and today even memory cards/sticks and HDDs/SSDs. The "upside" to this is that the surrounding laws allow us to make private copies for our own private use.
- pjerem 3y ago
  Because it’s illegal as long as you don’t own the original content. Those fees are here just to compensate the fact that you COULD copy your legally owned content and that it COULD represent a loss of opportunity for the rights holders mafia (because that’s what they are). Oh, and that compensation is calculated by an organization representative of … the rights holders.
  - mulmen 3y ago
    That is just absolutely mindblowingly insane to me. I honestly cannot wrap my head around it. Why the hell would I pay a fee for something I might do? I mean, what? How is that a thing? My car can go 140mph. Does that mean I should be in jail for speeding?
    - JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 3y ago
      I have never understood those laws since their introduction. You should go to jail because you could kill someone once in your life? And because of this, I have to pay taxes to famous singers (the "mafia") even if I only store family photos on my phone or on my computer. This makes absolutely no sense to me, and that's why I got my money back by using a VPN to download whatever I want.
      - pjerem 3y ago
        I suppose that those laws are from an era where the only media you could write was audio cassettes and it was mostly a way to record FM radio or copy your friends music. And now there is an intense lobbying not to change things.
        mulmen 3y ago
        Even that doesn’t pass the sniff test. I can record my own original information onto a cassette tape. If labels don’t want records to be created they shouldn’t blast the songs out for free. Claw back the royalties from the radio stations and see how long that works.
HPsquared 3y ago
There's an analogy to the Danegeld in there somewhere. But who is doing the raiding in this case?
Illniyar 3y ago
I find your comment interesting, but I don't know what this is referring to. Any chance you can expand on this point? or link to something that explains it?
- Y-bar 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
- lopis 3y ago
  Some countries in Europe decided that it was impossible to stop piracy. Instead they added a fee to storage devices, like disks and USB drives, that is supposed to compensate for the lost revenue. I don't remember where that money goes, but probably to big media companies?
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    It is not about piracy, but making copies for personal and family use. Like ripping cds and dvds. Or recording material on home video system.
    - daneel_w 3y ago
      The law states that it's for "lost sales" originating from e.g. recording songs aired on radio instead of buying the tape/CD. "Piracy for private use".
- Scandiravian 3y ago
  There's an additional tax on all storage media, be it harddrives, usb sticks, burnable CDs. If you can write data to it, the tax is applied. The tax is used to compensate rights holders. I don't know exactly how it's distributed or who is actually receiving the money, but the goal was to offset the alleged loss of income from piracy
  - daneel_w 3y ago
pjerem 3y ago
French too.
Longhanks 3y ago
Same for Switzerland, the "blank storage fee": https://www.suisa.ch/en/Kunden/Weitere-Tarife/Herstellung--Import-von-Speichermedien.html https://www.suisa.ch/en/Kunden/Weitere-Tarife/Herstellung--I...
- Gud 3y ago
  In Switzerland though copying for personal use is legal - not so in Scandinavian countries
  - daneel_w 3y ago
    > "In Switzerland though copying for personal use is legal - not so in Scandinavian countries" In Sweden it's legal. "Copying for private use" is excempt, and "private use" of such copy includes in the law's own words "family and one's closest friends". Literature is treated differently, allowing only partial copying instead of the complete print. I would be surprised if this wasn't harmonized across the Nordics, like most laws here are.
    - Gud 3y ago
      In Switzerland piracy(except software and games) for personal use is legal, not just copying to friends and family. In Sweden it is not allowed. Edit: to be clear: In Switzerland you can download movies legally without the consent of the copyright holder. In Sweden it is illegal.
      - daneel_w 3y ago
        You are plain wrong about Swedish law. I cannot state it any clearer: copying for private use is entirely legal for us, for both audio and video content, whether copied from broadcast, Internet or physical medium.
        Gud 3y ago
        No, I am right. See point 7 & 8: https://www.prv.se/sv/upphovsratt/streama-lagligt/faq-upphovsratt-och-streaming/ https://www.prv.se/sv/upphovsratt/streama-lagligt/faq-upphov... https://www.svt.se/kultur/rattsexperten-det-far-du-gora-pa-internet#:~:text=Däremot%20är%20nedladdning%20ett%20brott,det%20får%20du%20inte%20göra https://www.svt.se/kultur/rattsexperten-det-far-du-gora-pa-i....
Hamuko 3y ago
In Finland the copying fees are taken directly out of the state budget, so 100% of the (tax-paying) populace is paying for it.
Aachen 3y ago
No. What you shouldn't feel guilty about is storing legally obtained material on a purchased storage medium, like from a friend or the radio/TV. That is what the tax covers. We can argue whether that's fair and appropriate, and I suspect we share an opinion there, but saying that never paying any artist in the world is fine because your local copyright authority was paid... that's quite dubious
- daneel_w 3y ago
  The Swedish fee really is aimed at "piracy for private use", as clearly detailed in the written laws, not for duplicating one's own records/movies onto a second piece of storage.
  - Aachen 3y ago
    I didn't say it's for one's own content duplication Has an individual in Sweden ever been taken to court over sharing movies with others online? How did that go? I recall the pirate bay's domain was taken at some point and the hosting raided, despite not even hosting any copyrighted content but rather facilitating copyright infringement for the masses, so I presume copyright for individuals is still a thing there
    - daneel_w 3y ago
      > "Has an individual in Sweden ever been taken to court over sharing movies with others online? How did that go?" Yes, a handful of times. It almost always ends bad for the pirate, because sharing like that is not private copying for private use.
- madsbuch 3y ago
  Wouldn't it be congruent to remember to record it off the broadcast and download it later? A lot of what is being downloaded has already been broadcasted.
  - Aachen 3y ago
cabalamat 3y ago
In a reasonable world, if you've paid the copying fee, then downloading content would be legal. But no, the content corporations want to take a double dip.
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 3y ago
There is an equivalent tax in France where you pay for every hard drive, USB key, memory card, blank CD, blank DVD, smartphone, and tablet. Since this law was introduced, I stopped having any guilt when I download something. I still buy albums on Bandcamp because they deserve it, but the rest is free as I already paid for it without my consent.

mulmen 3y ago

Wait what? Really? In that case why not pirate your content? You already paid for it.

Aachen 3y ago
> why not pirate your content? You already paid for it Because you didn't pay for the content. Assuming it's analogous to the Dutch law, the tax compensates lost income from you being able to store publicly broadcast copyrighted materials, such as music on the radio or movies shown on TV. That's why it is taxed on storage devices and varies per device type. You haven't gotten a license on every piece of music, software, and movie in existence. That would be great lol, I'd sign up for that tax. Essentially, that's what Netflix was for movies until Disney etc. decided they wanted not to participate and now we wonder why piracy hasn't died
- mulmen 3y ago
  If storage devices contain a punitive charge for piracy then you did already pay for it. Why pay for a subscription if you already paid the fine?
  - Aachen 3y ago
    Punitive money goes into the government's general funds ("algemene middelen", not sure if there's an internationally correct legal term). This money, instead, goes to copyright holders. The amount is set to cover minor household use, like copying from a friend or a broadcast. It's not to absolve you from copyright law as an individual altogether and make you never have to pay for a movie in your life If that's what you want, parliament is the assembly you will want to talk to, but I'm afraid that they're bound by international treaties and, even if not, the height of the tax that absolves you of all copyright ever would be more than you're willing to pay
    - mulmen 3y ago
      That's fucking insane. Like, what? What if the drive isn't used to store any copywritten material ever? What if I use it to store my own log files or literally anything I want because it's none of your damn business? How is this fee distributed? How do I get a cut of this content creator reimbursement money for myself?
      - Aachen 3y ago
        Tell me about it :) I'm just explaining how the law works in my understanding (and, interestingly, not getting any upvotes for it. Usually accurate comments are upvoted but then, usually, people don't disagree with the law. People don't like this messenger!), not saying I agree with it
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        It's pragmatic. It's a pseudo-tax paid in order to cut out some space for fair use within copyright regulations (including international copyright treaties), while getting IP owners and distributors to shut up about "lost revenue from piracy". In some sense, this is a rent extracted by large IP holders, and consumers are getting the short end of the deal just as much as the artists. But arguably it's also a bureaucracy-minimizing and thus cost-minimizing approach at country scale: the alternative to a flat fee paid by some amount of commercial entities (and passed onto buyers through prices of hardware), would likely be dealing with individual-level enforcement, lawsuits targeting individuals and/or some other high-maintenance mess, all ultimately paid for by the taxpayer anyway.
        mulmen 3y ago
        It’s pragmatic in the same way as negotiating with terrorists is pragmatic. It’s an exploitable philosophy.
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 3y ago
  > Because you didn't pay for the content I'm in France and you do actually pay for it through this tax since all the income goes to a private company like the RIAA.
robertlagrant 3y ago
Only if you paid the people who own the content.
- mulmen 3y ago
  Maybe I misunderstand but it sounds to me like there's some additional charge on storage devices that includes the cost of piracy ("copying"). Which means you did pay for it in the sense that you paid the fine for piracy. Building a piracy fee into storage devices is an incentive to pirate because you already paid for it. Why pay the fine for piracy and also pay for the content legitimately?
  - martin8412 3y ago
    The fee is for legal copying. Let's say you've bought a DVD and want a copy for your family vacation home. You can make a copy of that legally. That's what the fee covers. Something I've never done and will probably never do. I also don't know of anyone who ever has. The fee should completely go away in the age of streaming services, but I doubt rights holders agree.
    - mulmen 3y ago
      Why would I pay a fee to legally copy something? What if I don't copy any content on that drive ever and I use it purely to store my original creations? Why would the fee be built in to the storage device and not the original content price? This makes zero sense to me.
      - martin8412 3y ago
        It doesn't make any sense. To make it even worse, you also pay the fee on the internal storage of smartphones.
        mulmen 3y ago
        How can that be a thing?!
madsbuch 3y ago
As you can see, more than 50% of Danes already do. Being a Dane myself, my impression is that it is less stigmatised in Denmark than in other countries.
- cabalamat 3y ago
  As far as I can tell it isn't stigmatised in the UK. Or at least no-one has ever told me I'm a bad person for copying stuff.
- mulmen 3y ago
  Around the turn of the century my family went from dialup to cable. It felt like a waste to not use all the bandwidth all the time. I had a surplus server running Windows 2000 and Kazaa, Limewire, and maybe more. I think I missed Napster. That was a completely normal thing among all my IT literate friends. My rig was kinda anemic. A buddy of mine had four 250gb hard drives. A whole ~terabyte~ of storage. And a liquid cooled AMD. I put a mod chip in my Xbox and brought it to school where we watched (pirated) Monty Python in English class. All this to say it was normalized in the US. I don't think it is stigmatized even today. More like we had about a decade of streaming services actually providing good value. But now the product managers and UX designers have their hooks so deep in it that it's becoming unusable.
- daneel_w 3y ago
  Same in Sweden. Nobody really feels guilty over doing it, and nobody judges others for doing it, because the laws permitting private copying blur the lines so to speak. But that said, by my feeling most Swedes would agree that running an actual piracy outlet of some sort holds an entirely different "sociomoral" tone because of really being illegal.
daneel_w 3y ago
Yep, really. We've been subjected to this at least since the 80s. The original name of the legal framework was "kassettavgift" (cassette fee), obviously targeted at sales of cassette tapes. From there it went on to also afflict VHS tapes, Minidiscs, CD/DVD recordables, and today even memory cards/sticks and HDDs/SSDs. The "upside" to this is that the surrounding laws allow us to make private copies for our own private use.
pjerem 3y ago
Because it’s illegal as long as you don’t own the original content. Those fees are here just to compensate the fact that you COULD copy your legally owned content and that it COULD represent a loss of opportunity for the rights holders mafia (because that’s what they are). Oh, and that compensation is calculated by an organization representative of … the rights holders.
- mulmen 3y ago
  That is just absolutely mindblowingly insane to me. I honestly cannot wrap my head around it. Why the hell would I pay a fee for something I might do? I mean, what? How is that a thing? My car can go 140mph. Does that mean I should be in jail for speeding?
  - JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 3y ago
    I have never understood those laws since their introduction. You should go to jail because you could kill someone once in your life? And because of this, I have to pay taxes to famous singers (the "mafia") even if I only store family photos on my phone or on my computer. This makes absolutely no sense to me, and that's why I got my money back by using a VPN to download whatever I want.
    - pjerem 3y ago
      I suppose that those laws are from an era where the only media you could write was audio cassettes and it was mostly a way to record FM radio or copy your friends music. And now there is an intense lobbying not to change things.
      - mulmen 3y ago
        Even that doesn’t pass the sniff test. I can record my own original information onto a cassette tape. If labels don’t want records to be created they shouldn’t blast the songs out for free. Claw back the royalties from the radio stations and see how long that works.

HPsquared 3y ago

There's an analogy to the Danegeld in there somewhere. But who is doing the raiding in this case?

Illniyar 3y ago

I find your comment interesting, but I don't know what this is referring to. Any chance you can expand on this point? or link to something that explains it?

Y-bar 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
lopis 3y ago
Some countries in Europe decided that it was impossible to stop piracy. Instead they added a fee to storage devices, like disks and USB drives, that is supposed to compensate for the lost revenue. I don't remember where that money goes, but probably to big media companies?
- Ekaros 3y ago
  It is not about piracy, but making copies for personal and family use. Like ripping cds and dvds. Or recording material on home video system.
  - daneel_w 3y ago
    The law states that it's for "lost sales" originating from e.g. recording songs aired on radio instead of buying the tape/CD. "Piracy for private use".
Scandiravian 3y ago
There's an additional tax on all storage media, be it harddrives, usb sticks, burnable CDs. If you can write data to it, the tax is applied. The tax is used to compensate rights holders. I don't know exactly how it's distributed or who is actually receiving the money, but the goal was to offset the alleged loss of income from piracy
- daneel_w 3y ago

pjerem 3y ago

French too.

Longhanks 3y ago

Same for Switzerland, the "blank storage fee": https://www.suisa.ch/en/Kunden/Weitere-Tarife/Herstellung--Import-von-Speichermedien.html https://www.suisa.ch/en/Kunden/Weitere-Tarife/Herstellung--I...

Gud 3y ago
In Switzerland though copying for personal use is legal - not so in Scandinavian countries
- daneel_w 3y ago
  > "In Switzerland though copying for personal use is legal - not so in Scandinavian countries" In Sweden it's legal. "Copying for private use" is excempt, and "private use" of such copy includes in the law's own words "family and one's closest friends". Literature is treated differently, allowing only partial copying instead of the complete print. I would be surprised if this wasn't harmonized across the Nordics, like most laws here are.
  - Gud 3y ago
    In Switzerland piracy(except software and games) for personal use is legal, not just copying to friends and family. In Sweden it is not allowed. Edit: to be clear: In Switzerland you can download movies legally without the consent of the copyright holder. In Sweden it is illegal.
    - daneel_w 3y ago
      You are plain wrong about Swedish law. I cannot state it any clearer: copying for private use is entirely legal for us, for both audio and video content, whether copied from broadcast, Internet or physical medium.
      - Gud 3y ago
        No, I am right. See point 7 & 8: https://www.prv.se/sv/upphovsratt/streama-lagligt/faq-upphovsratt-och-streaming/ https://www.prv.se/sv/upphovsratt/streama-lagligt/faq-upphov... https://www.svt.se/kultur/rattsexperten-det-far-du-gora-pa-internet#:~:text=Däremot%20är%20nedladdning%20ett%20brott,det%20får%20du%20inte%20göra https://www.svt.se/kultur/rattsexperten-det-far-du-gora-pa-i....

Hamuko 3y ago

In Finland the copying fees are taken directly out of the state budget, so 100% of the (tax-paying) populace is paying for it.

Aachen 3y ago

No. What you shouldn't feel guilty about is storing legally obtained material on a purchased storage medium, like from a friend or the radio/TV. That is what the tax covers. We can argue whether that's fair and appropriate, and I suspect we share an opinion there, but saying that never paying any artist in the world is fine because your local copyright authority was paid... that's quite dubious

daneel_w 3y ago
The Swedish fee really is aimed at "piracy for private use", as clearly detailed in the written laws, not for duplicating one's own records/movies onto a second piece of storage.
- Aachen 3y ago
  I didn't say it's for one's own content duplication Has an individual in Sweden ever been taken to court over sharing movies with others online? How did that go? I recall the pirate bay's domain was taken at some point and the hosting raided, despite not even hosting any copyrighted content but rather facilitating copyright infringement for the masses, so I presume copyright for individuals is still a thing there
  - daneel_w 3y ago
    > "Has an individual in Sweden ever been taken to court over sharing movies with others online? How did that go?" Yes, a handful of times. It almost always ends bad for the pirate, because sharing like that is not private copying for private use.
madsbuch 3y ago
Wouldn't it be congruent to remember to record it off the broadcast and download it later? A lot of what is being downloaded has already been broadcasted.
- Aachen 3y ago

cabalamat 3y ago

In a reasonable world, if you've paid the copying fee, then downloading content would be legal. But no, the content corporations want to take a double dip.

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 3y ago

There is an equivalent tax in France where you pay for every hard drive, USB key, memory card, blank CD, blank DVD, smartphone, and tablet. Since this law was introduced, I stopped having any guilt when I download something. I still buy albums on Bandcamp because they deserve it, but the rest is free as I already paid for it without my consent.