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Comment by samuirai | Hacker News Reader

Funny that you mention "storage vendors". In Germany we have to pay a fee as compensation on storage like USB sticks, because it is potentially used to store copyright material. It's outrageous.

http://www.geek.com/news/germany-increases-usb-flash-drive-t...

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I actually love this tax. It makes it morally, and possibly also legaly, excusable to share/pirate media.

Finland had a similar tax before. At least here the purpose of the tax was to offset the loss of income incurred from (perfectly legal) private copying (i.e. making copies for yourself or your close friends). In this sense our tax did not excuse piracy.

On the other hand one might not agree to offsetting costs from legal copying and use the tax as an excuse for piracy anyway.

Well, if the copying is legal, then noone deserves to be compesated for it, obviously.

Furthermore, I don't even agree with offsetting costs from illegal copying (since there are no provable costs), hence my moral interpretation of the tax.

Same in France. I now pirate while feeling I have the right to do it. Thanks you deer government for this tax !

Same in Sweden, why is a storage vendor more liable than a CPU or memory vendor?

Devil's Advocate:

The storage device is where the copy of the copyrighted media resides. The CPU, speakers, headphones, video display, RAM, etc. are all transitory in their involvement of piracy; but the hard drive/USB stick is "where" the violation is taking place.

Again, devil's advocate here! This is mostly a thought exercise.

Some media companies have tried to sue switch makers over the fact that their switches temporarily hold copies of the sent media in their cache without a license.

So what if you watch the film shortly after download and remove it immediately after viewing? Transitory -> not instrumental in enabling piracy?

Or even more directly, download to a ramdisk.

Looking forward to the upcoming documentary COPYGATE - A documentary about Copyswede that is addressing this. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/danielbramme/copygate

In the US there's something like that, though with a narrower set of devices/media covered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Home_Recording_Act

It is the same in Russia. But does it implicate that, according to No-double-pay-for-one-service principle we can legally pirate stuff and store it on our storage drives?

Same in Lithuania :(

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