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Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

Combining two videos in this way would be unlawful in the UK, where we have the very restricted "Fair Dealing" concessions, because downloading the videos in the first place is a tort[0].

Combining them is another, sharing them is another.

We basically have no concept of personal use in our copyright.

[0] if they were broadcast you can record but only for time-shifting, you can only watch once (alone!) and then are obliged to destroy the copy; you aren't allowed to format shift.

The lack of any remaining semblance of balance in copyright between the rights of the demos and media interests shows how badly distorted our Western democracies have become from representing the rights of people in general above the rights of the rich.

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Compare that to my country, where it's perfectly legal to download whatever music or movies you like from the internet for personal use, pirate websites or not. Also a western democracy. So it's not so bad everywhere.

Though a price for this is that we pay a special tax on every storage device we purchase.

Turkey? We pay TRT license for all audiovisual capable equipment which is able to receive TRT content.

If you don’t mind, where is this?

My mind jumped to Canada when I read the above comment, but really there are a number of countries that fit the mould. Most western countries have a special levy on blank media, including all EU member states except Luxembourg. I don't know which countries don't prohibit the downloading copyrighted material similarly to how they prohibit sharing that media, but Canada is one of them.

A special tax on storage devices and legal status for downloads matches Russia.

Not a western democracy, though.

It's like this in Poland for sure. You can't share, but can download. Doesn't apply to software of course due to its different licensing schema.

That still makes torrenting illegal

Yes, but how would you prove how many copies of something someone shared?

Not if you just leech, right?

Could be Czech republic or Slovakia.

Czech republic

Honestly the lack of balance with copyright law is why I simply ignore copyrights. They have become irrelevant to me.

Before this law, I would've retorted that it's not the Western democracies that are broken, just the US, and it's padawan, the UK. Now, however, I have to agree. Even the US-like fearmongering and terrorism of armed forces within EU cities is getting more prevalent lately.

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