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Comment by jillyboel | Hacker News Reader

And of course the "thuiskopieheffing", a tax on any storage device that ostensibly is used to fund those whose media gets copied, is still in effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy#Netherlan...

As long as I'm paying a tax for it, it is my right to copy

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No, it is not your right to copy! If you want to keep using euros and have free travel to other Eurozone countries, you need to respect EU law. The tax does not respect EU law because it makes no effort to actually offset losses to copyright holders.

Your comment doesn't even make sense! The intention was never to make piracy okay, it was to offset a tiny fraction of the financial losses. These financial losses are still occurring even now that piracy is formally illegal, so the tax is still justified.

More generally this seems a form of freeloading: picking the parts of the EU that you like, ignoring the parts that don't. Who cares about society, it's just me me me. Pure selfishness.

Collecting restitution from innocent parties is perhaps the definition of injustice.

Not sure what you're on about but it was permitted by law, and the tax exists because of that reason. The EU bullied the NL into changing some laws (which aren't enforced), but the NL is still charging this tax.

None of that really has anything to do with me, I'm not a bureaucrat. But they chose to still tax me, so as far as I'm concerned I have the moral right to download as much as I want.

Anyway, feel free to lobby the NL to drop this tax and then we can talk.

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