Video Game Piracy costs the industry as much as it makes!

[SvennoJ]

Burek said:

SvennoJ said:

They have the same thing in The Netherlands (at least when I lived there). Is that a good solution? Why do I need to pay a tax for my home videos. Plus does you isp pay that same tax for every GB you download? With streaming this tax on rewritable media has become outdated and pointless. Only the pirates win.

Btw in the future a general tax on bandwidth can still happen. The battle is long from over.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/digital-culture/canadian-downloaders-should-expect-a-copyright-notice-in-the-mail/article22336673/

Now you have companies trying to scam the pirates, karma lol
http://www.metronews.ca/news/canada/2015/04/22/canadians-under-no-obligation-to-pay-for-piracy.html

They have been tracking illegal downloads for years, this is from 2011
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2388261,00.asp

Streaming is not considered piracy, EU courts have ruled that:  http://www.digital-digest.com/news-63934-Watching-Pirated-Streams-Is-Legal-Rules-EU-Court.html

So taxation on recordable media makes sense because if you do not download it everything is fine. ISPs do not charge any additional taxes, Hungary tried it and caused such revolution that they reversed their decision in a week.  http://dailynewshungary.com/protesters-demand-withdrawal-of-proposed-internet-tax/

That doesn't mean it's legal
It's worth noting that this ruling does not exempt operators of these streaming services from legal responsibility, only the viewers and users of these services.
The case was about people receiving emails with copyrighted material, whether people opening those emails can be sued... It's a loophole. I imagine it was passed because it's impossible to prove intent with auto playing streams.

Taxation on recordable media does not make sense. Most people download, watch, delete. It made some sense in the past with casette tapes, as it was normal to record from the radio and make mix tapes etc. Nowadays there is zero relation between the storage type and possible copyright infringement.  A 2tb hdd can hold over 500,000 songs, a thousand SD movies or 200 HD movies. There must be some hefty tax on that...

The revenue lost is not the only downside.
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2015/07/16/if-you-think-piracy-is-decreasing-you-havent-looked-at-the-data-2/
Roughly 20% of internet traffic is piracy related. Or basically 1/5th of what I pay my isp, is to pay for bandwidth used for piracy... Overpriced internet with bandwidth caps.