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Comment by CaptainZapp | Hacker News Reader

One of the reasons, though, why doenloading is and remains legal in Switzerland, is that a levy is charged on blank media, which can be used for recording purposes[1].

Even though I can hear the wails and hollers it seems to me like a rather fair compromise and it's not incredibly high to begin with.

[1] https://www.suisa.ch/en/customers/levy-for-blank-storage-med...

edit : typo

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Australia also has blank media surcharges, from memory. Though it is not well known about. I've always thought of it as an insidious method to recover potential future (criminal? civil?) losses from otherwise innocent people in the present.

Though I will agree it is highly pragmatic, and not a noticeably large amount in Australia. Otherwise, people would perhaps have noticed.

Same in Austria, there's that tax but downloading is illegal so we get worst of both worlds.

Same in France, except that tax is so high it's skewing the EU average and it created a black market of hard drives and DVDs.

Why not just order from e.g. Germany?

Germany also has that tax. Its on everything from printers to usb sticks and dvd drives.

Its especially fucked up since its explicitly to allow for private copies. Instead it is illegal to circumvent copy protection. Those tax schemes are a major rip off and nothing but pandering to powerful lobbies. Its protection money.

Actually people still order it from Germany since the French tax is much higher.

Legally speaking you have to declare imported drives and pay taxes on them.

Is this specific for drives? I thought the whole European single market thing was to prevent taxing of stuff bought inside the single market? (serious question)

They have different pricing depending on the type of storage medium (Phone/USB Drive/Regular HDD)

https://www.copiefrance.fr/images/documents/tarifs_FR_2019_0...

Looking into it, it seems to not be considered a tax as it's not collected by the government, it also states that if you are importing a drive from a country that also collects such a "tax" you should seek to be reimbursed from the exporting country and pay the "tax" to the importing country.

Their FAQ: https://www.copiefrance.fr/fr/ressources/questions-reponses

Thank you for the links, I was not aware that the consumer is legally required to pay the "copyright tax" on EU imported storage media falling under this ruling.

The Netherlands also has the tax AND it's illegal to download. The tax is even charged on all kinds of storage media, even phones bought in stores.

Well, this used to be why it's legal to download, because of that tax. Then the European court of justice came along and went "oh no that's not how this works" and then downloading was suddenly illegal without a change of law by elected leaders. I don't get why we still have the tax, but compensation for downloading was actually the purpose.

Which european court decision do you mean? Is it EU wide?

I know it's illegal to upload which includes sharing a torrent. But it has been legal to download movies and games. For instance from Internet Archive, which has lots of music and games.

So because you _could_ copy illegally, the tax is taken?

Thats like putting a tax on cars because they might be used in a heist. Or a tax on weapons because there might be murder...

Those taxes are no fines but the fees to allow you to make private copies of copyrighted work. Not a bad idea until private copies were made illegal by introducing laws to circumvent copy protection. Today the tax is just a giant "Screw you, because we can" in most countries who still have it.

I actually kind of like the idea, and it smacks of a pigovian tax, which are generally quite fair. If something has a negative externality, taxing it to correct the negative externality makes sense. For example, taxing carbon emissions is hard, but taxing fuel is fairly easy, so gasoline and coal taxes make sense as a reasonably close approximation.

That being said, the question really is: is the tax fair (mostly affects the causers of the negative externality) and effective (does it actually reduce or fix the negative externality)? I haven't read the research to know the latter, but it seems the former isn't satisfied since there are legitimate uses for high capacity blank media. That being said, I'm not against it in principle.

My personal view is that IP protection is too generous, which results in larger IP owners having an unfair advantage. IP laws were intended to help protect smaller creators and encourage contributing to the public domain, but these days it seems to only help those who can afford to litigate. I think that by reducing IP protection terms, we can make progress on both fronts (ideally have extendable IP protections if the owner can prove they need more time to recoup their investment).

I mean they kinda do... Sales tax is on most things and pays for the police.

In France there is the levy, and download is still illegal.

Does the tax apply to hard drives? Does it apply to 'full' hard drives? Seems like any tax on commodity storage would really hurt tech companies.

Spain apparently has something similar, though I have no idea how they distribute the money (I have a feeling that they don't).

The money is distributed among several professional associations of "media producers", of which the SGAE is the most famous one, and also the one whose board of directors were charged with embezzlement.

That doesn't surprise me.

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