The Pirate Bay celebrates its 20th anniversary today. Founded in 2003 by a collective of hackers and activists, the small Swedish BitTorrent tracker grew to become a global icon for online piracy. The rebellious torrent site has a turbulent history and clashed with law enforcement authorities on multiple occasions. Despite these setbacks, it remains online today.
Anyone from Sweden here? How is the landscape nowadays? Is piracy still a big thing?
Swede here. I would say that piracy had it’s peak before the raid in 2006 and further harmed by copyswede and thier lobbying for an extra tax on anything that has some form of storage media, can’t remember what year that tax came into effect. I might be wrong but that’s my experience.
So they tax you extra if you buy a NAS? Or any type of digital storage?
It’s similar in Germany and I guess most of Europe. For any device capable of copying copyrighted material the GEMA collects royalties because it could be used legal private copies. It’s currently 0,30€ for USB sticks and 13€ for PC’s. They even collect fees for devices like smartwatches and printers.
This fee is explicitly not for illegal distribution of copyrighted material but only for legal private copies. It’s absurd.
I’m not sure about digital storage such as cloud serviced. But for example you decide to but a new HDD/SSD you pay an extra 1.25 SEK/GiB up to a maximum of 100 SEK, or a new mobile phone that’s another 4.38 SEK/GiB with no upper limit.
The reasoning behind that tax is that in Sweden you are allowed to make personal copies of media you own and apparently the movie/music industry loses to much money due to that law. So that money will go to the movie or music labels as compensation for lost revenue.
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That’s a tax i think I could get behind in the US if it meant I could get what I want for a price that is fair.
I buy games. I subscribe to YouTube premium for ad free access to their content and music streaming library.
I refuse to pay $200 per month for a cable tv plan that has the 4 channels I’d want to watch and 2000 I don’t give a shit about. I refuse to sign up for every streaming service under the sun to cobble together what I want to watch. So I pay what I think is a fair price for a vpn subscription, a debrid service and an iptv plan.
I’m more than willing to pay, just not what they’re asking me to pay.