loltldr
OK EXPERT ANALYSIS:
Shitty wall of text article, enough information for American attention span
to break, tricking them into jumping to conclusion. (Anti EU, surprise!)
Directive judges that:
- Authors 'suffer damage' when private copying occurs.
- Therefore they must be compensated for private copying.
Countries that want their laws EU synchronized may either:
- Not allow private copying without author permission
- Allow private copying and compensate authors
Directive RELEASES countries from obligation to track private copying due to technical difficulty of such.
Countries are expected to implement compensation by different means.
Explicitly allowed possibility of taxing reproduction equipment, but can be anything. (Anything they can defend in court as fair compensation of authors, if fairness is challenged in EU law court)
Directive does not constrain countries in amount of compensation required or what is covered if taxation is used.
From above, it does not introduce a 'private copying levy'.
Specific details for my country:
Private copying compensation laws passed several years ago.
All general purpose storage media taxed. (HDs, SSDs, memory sticks, ROM in printers (wtf), etc.)
No additional legislation will be enacted to comply, and I expect same holds for the other EU countries already implementing it. (Some listed on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy the wiki link you posted)
Now how is an EU directive telling countries to pass laws compensating authors for private copying, (By means, amount and scope they can freely choose) responsible for hard drive price doubling?
It is profitable for providers to synchronuously rise prices on a market good in agreement.
This is against the law. (
Collusion,
Price fixing)
The LCD monitor manufacturer companies were investigated & fined for latter some time ago.
US harddrive production barons are wiser, and decided to wait for a special event (Floods -> Natural disaster -> Act of Dog), in order to divert attention of supervision committees.
Independently of this the evil internet US cartel is blaming some EU law.
Expect similar anal-perforation in other industries for example:
ISPs switching to 'usage based billing'.
You may think it is no big deal as they are just exchanging the way your bill is calculated, but what happens is price of gigabyte magically jumps by 3 orders of magnitude in every ISP serving your area at once.
Good luck getting a mass of people jumping ship to an another provider with the same prices or what ever the 'free market' religion evangelist told you will make private for profit companies magically yield in consumer favour against their interests.
Afaik smoth goes to 4chan for his anti EU stuff, is this really common in your community :3?
live in a house too and plus not decent work... 
