Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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You need a VPN for everything when it comes to pirating. (kbin.melroy.org)

submitted 16 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

40 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Let's not turn this into what the Reddit subreddit of Piracy has turned into and that's an endless sea of questions that are all the same - "Do I need a VPN?".

And the loud and vocal answer to such a question is - yes. Yes you do need a VPN for pirating. Nobody gets a VPN for casual use and I'm under the impression that VPN services know a lot of people are going to be going to them for pirating and not just accessing content out of their country. And it's for that reason, is why I'm skeptical on entrusting my activity with the bigger VPN names available.

I use ProtonVPN myself, by the way.

Pirating under your raw IP address, only will set you up to get pegged by your ISP whether it's in a short time or a long time. I've only ever gotten one single ISP letter in my entire 26 years of pirating and it was simply because I downloaded without a VPN. Well I was also downloading off of someone else's network to take the fall, but I was confronted about it either way.

And I've gotten away with so much pirating because of my careful cautiousness when it comes to pirating. That and this applies to the United States, but the statue of limitations is 3 years when it comes to copyright infringement. So, good fucking luck to any ISP or so that wishes to try and nail me for something I downloaded 10 years ago, but I digress.

But a large part of me avoiding so much does contribute to having a VPN. So, yes, VPN is required. Please don't ask anybody in the pirating community 100 questions that are all just ways to ask whether or not you need a VPN. You do.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (3 children)

I don't have to worry about any of this because I live in Denmark! It is not possible for me to pirate stuff because it implies that I did not pay, which I did as there is a special piracy tax!

We call it 'blankmedieafgiften'.

~~we call it 'kulturarvsafgiften' and apparently you can't google it which I'm not gonna imply any conspiracies about but yknow~~

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

I don't know about your piracy tax specifically, but there's also a tax on any storage media, printers etc. in Germany.

The "Urheberrechtsabgabe" (copyright duty) is not about paying for pirate copies, but it's a compensation for the loss due to the right to a private copy. A private copy is e.g. a copy of a CD I own in case the original gets destroyed. It's explicitly not allowed to share them.

Sadly the right to a private copy gets canceled as soon as it's necessary to break a "working" copy protection. CD copy protection has been broken for decades, but it still counts as a "working" copy protection. Thus a private copy is practically not possible legally, but we still pay this tax on any storage media... I really hate the copyright lobby.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 hours ago

is not about paying for pirate copies, but it’s a compensation for the loss due to the right to a private copy.

Sounds an awful lot like a piracy tax... We pay this tax on any device which can store bits, it's not just some storage mediums. If you buy a phone, you're paying this tax to a """non-profit""" org called CopyDan whose sole job is to make sure a few select fat cat copyright holders get paid. If I don't break their copyright, I still have to pay as if I did. Therefore, it's a piracy tax.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Do you know, is this another tax additional to "blankmedieafgiften" ("blank media tax" or "private copying levy"), or is it the same tax under a different name?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Actually it might be blankmedieafgiften, that sounds far more correct. I was having trouble finding the exact term and ChatGPT was very confident (I know...) when I eventually gave up and asked it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Private copying levy. In Sweden, it's called privatkopieringsersättning.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

That's semantics. They're charging it because they're afraid you're copying copy-protected materials, which is piracy. It's a piracy tax.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 minutes ago

No, it's ackshully a private copying levy. I get what you mean, but it's a "good" thing, because otherwise 12 § upphovsrättslagen probably wouldn't exist anymore:

Var och en får för privat bruk framställa ett eller några få exemplar av offentliggjorda verk. Såvitt gäller litterära verk i skriftlig form får exemplarframställningen dock endast avse begränsade delar av verk eller sådana verk av begränsat omfång. Exemplaren får inte användas för andra ändamål än privat bruk.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 hours ago

I live in Denmark (no Dane) and I never heard about it. Interesting to know.