[sz4kerto]

For example, here (in Hungary) we are paying some extra 'contribution' whenever we buy storage (HDDs, SSDs, SD cards, USB sticks) that is intended to compensate artists and distributors for lost revenue because the assumption is that we'll likely store pirated stuff on them.

Therefore downloading is not illegal here (sharing is, which kind of puts torrents into a strange place).

The world is a bit crazy, isn't it.

[lubonay]

What happened to "innocent until proven guilty"? That's just a fine where they assume you'd pirate stuff in the future!

[JeanMarcS]

It can be even more stupid than that. In France, where we have same sort of law, you have to pay it also if you are a business...

You can get the tax back, but you have to jump through a lot of hoop holes, and so not a lot of business do it.

It’s purely racket.

[awicz]

Wow. That is an interesting model! Do you know how they determine how the funds are distributed?

[scandinavegan]

Sweden has the same system. You can read more about it here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy

The collected money is in general handed out by Copyswede [1], but for music it's handled by STIM [2]. STIM also supposedly handles paying money to artists played for customers at the barber, and all these special cases, and music played on TV, and so on.

I don't know for sure, but I think that the money is divided based on official sales data, so the artists who sell most also gets most of the "cassette tax" as it is known, because it was introduced as an added tax on cassettes back in the 80s.

It is not popular with consumers, since you have to pay extra for blank CDs, DVDs, USB sticks, and hard drives even if you don't use them to copy music. The tax is not to cover loss of income due to piracy, I just learned from the Wikipedia page, but to enable private copying of music without having to buy extra copies from the producer. As I said, since you have to pay even if you use the CD as a Linux boot disc, it's not very popular with the public, but a lot of people don't even know about it.

[1] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyswede (in Swedish)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIM (in English)

[sz4kerto]

Yes. Almost no money is given to the artists, most of it is eaten by the organization that claims to be representing them and has good political connections.

[whatch]

Same in Russia. But they tax not only storage but basically everything that can play music and/or video including desktops, laptops, tablets and phones.