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.
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.