The film and music industries really shot themselves in the foot when they got a tax on recordable media introduced in Canada.

OK, CD-R's and flash memory cost a bunch more now. Streaming is legal, because customers already paid the record companies for their music they downloaded and put on that media.

At least, someone explained this was the current state of Canadian law ~10 years back when I first visited.

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Levitz 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

This is basically the case right now in Spain.

We pay a tax on every piece of recordable media (don't think it's only SD cards or hard drives, it applies to phones, laptops, mp3 players, ebooks, even smartwatches). In exchange, sharing media for personal use is legal, and P2P is sharing media.

Doesn't stop corporations from trying to scare people off and complaining about piracy though of course.

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crote 6 days ago | parent [-]

The Netherlands has the same tax, but they managed to ban the "sharing media" part.

First they outlawed uploading media (you could make a copy for your own use, but as you didn't hold the rights you weren't allowed to offer it to anyone else), then they outlawed the downloading as well (you can still make a copy for your own use, but you can't obtain it from someone who doesn't have the rights to offer it to you).

You aren't even allowed to download a copy of a piece of media you already legally own, so the only thing left is making a copy of a physical disk - which is of course made nearly impossible by copy protection.

The organisation behind it is now even claiming that you should pay the tax when a streaming service uses storage space on your device to temporarily make an offline copy...

	▲	chairmansteve 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		I guess we're going to have to go back to telling stories around a campfire....

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codedokode 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Tax on recordable media is unfair because honest people who don't pirate anything also have to pay. As with the case above, honest people get screwed the most.

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subscribed 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Wait a second, if I paid a tax allowing me to legally doenload/record..... what's dishonest in it?

It's basically a subscription.

	▲	5 days ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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Gud 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Nothing dishonest with pirating. You wouldn’t download a car? Well I would.

	▲	wubrr 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		I can't believe people still fall for the 'piracy bad' propaganda in 2025

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xethos 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Must have been a good while ago, as we're currently at $0.29 CAD for blank CDs and... nothing else. Nothing on uSD cards, nothing for floppies, hard drives and SSDs are levy-free,and blank Blu-Ray discs have no extra charge

I'd actually rather this than the million dollar settlements for torrenting Germans and Americans have. We have "Notice and Notice", which basically means the ISP sends us a letter with very little legal heft to it.

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