Well, that's how it is. You pay the tax on blank media but you don't obviously get the right to pirate whatever you want. The tax is to reimburse for lost revenue regardless of if you pirate or not.

No they haven't. It was legal to download movies and music (software and games usually wasn't), but that changed like 10 years ago in most european countries. They do pay extra cost on certain products but that doesn't mean downloading would be legal now.

WebKit is doing exactly what Microsoft accuses it of. They are developing their own extensions and putting them out as webkit- prefixed. Of course Microsoft shouldn't try to implement these non-standard extensions but use the standard ones. This is why I see nothing "funny" or "bizarre" about it, other than for the fact that WebKit is now doing exactly what everyone hated IE doing years ago.