Originally posted by Waruna:
well if this subject is so taboo there must be a reason for it hence i would guess that its not legal to download episodes from the net but then this raises the question is recording it on to a video tape legal ? as this is pretty much the same thing isnt it !
I don't know about other countries, but here in Denmark we pay a very hefty tax per sold blank cassette, VHS tape and CD-RW. The taxes goes to a semi-private organization called CopyDan, which pays artist, writers, companies etc. a royalty every time their song, movie, cartoon, what-have-you is broadcast or in other way publicised.
The idea was, that the government realized it would be to difficult to uphold the law, regarding taping of TV-programs, so they went the other way around and taxed the crime. Go figure. The system worked pretty well. Up until a few years back.
Then the artist felt they where cheated (whether they were, I'm not really sure) and demanded more money. CopyDan at that point had been granted the right to regulate the taxes, and opted for a big increase in the tax on VHS tapes, and the government approved. The result was that the sale of VHS tapes plummeted with almost 45%. I could have told them that, but they didn't ask.
Then downloading became a major issue, and once more CopyDan reacted. They raised the tax on CD-RW's to the highest in the world (yeah, another tax record for Denmark, whop-di-doo
). Whether sales is going to plummet, we haven't really seen yet, but I guess they will (the stores still have plenty of pre-tax-CD-RW's to sell).
And now they're planning to put taxes on PC's, modems, harddrives, rams etc. The rationale being that all theese things makes it possible to download copyrighted material from the Net. That raised quite a uproar, and CopyDan has postponed the taxes until further (they became even more hated than they already was, there where even talks about abolishing CopyDan).
So is there a point to all this ranting, or is Teral just letting of steam?
Hmm, I'm almost certain, I started out with the intent to make a point about something. It's all a bit hazy right now.
The point being, although taping TV-programs might be technically illegal (and I'm not sure whether it is, or isn't) the introduction of taxes on the storage medium makes it accepted. Futher more it's known how many times the material is publicized, and royalties is paid accordingly. Where as downloading copyrighted material from the Net to your computer, isn't taxed, or known, and thus the artists wont get any royalties, therefore it's explicit illegal.
Just IMNSHO.
And that's my 0.02$ worth of brainwork.
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