It's a disgrace that so many work so hard on their craft, only to have the fruits of their efforts ripped off by the immoral.
I hope the authorities shut all these torrent search engines down, and prosecute the owners to the full extent of the law.
Where I live the state even invented a special tax on digital supports (USB, Hard Drives, etc...) to "favor the authors" because of "piracy". Never met a single author that benefited from that. And trust me I know a lot of them.
Copyright laws were made, and exist, to privilege the industry (which does include authors, at the bottom, if you scrap hard enough).
Just read through the legal code of your country and try to place the "so many" who "work so hard on their craft" along the lines.
But if the tax isn't going to the copyright holders, then sounds like the tax is stealing from the copyright holders also.
Well yes, the storage device is legal. If you meant that this tax legitimised the process of unlicensed content reproduction: You'd probably be better off by lowering your expectations in law makers consistency.
It must be comfortable to judge people from comfort of a couch in 1st world country, right? What about point in constitution of many countries about free access to culture?
Music stars make most of their money out of concerts anyways, and selling music is actual way to make money by huge labels. But you surely knew that only 10% of each CD goes to actual performers.
And tbf - the only reason I am using torrents here in Europe is because there is no alternative. Netflix is 1/4th of what it is in US, there is no other services that would have huge library of movies and despite looking many times torrents are still the only option for someone who likes to see huge catalog of movies on demand.
If the rights-holders made their content accessible and at a reasonable price to consumers, torrents would disappear.