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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

I like how he thinks that Netflix and Redbox are also ripping him off. It's like he expects each person who sees the movie to pay for the entire production. Anything less is ruining the industry.

I disagree with this, though. I think it should be legally required for everyone to pay for the movie, regardless of whether or not they see it. That way, nobody can steal his hard work!!

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Don't even joke about that.

In Denmark we pay "license" to the state, to keep the public television and radio channels going. Mind you, this isn't part of the tax and it's completely optional whether you want to pay it or not.

Except, if you have a television, an internet connection, a cellphone, a radio or any device capable of receiving a television signal via an antenna or internet connection - you have to pay. After all, you have the ability to watch/hear the content. Whether you do or not, that doesn't matter. If we paid this through our taxes, it wouldn't be an issue (compared to what else we pay for). This being a pseudo-tax masked as an optional thing, that's ridicilous though.

Oh and on top of that we pay an extra tax (which goes to the artists) on casette tapes, CD-R's, DVD-R's, VHS tapes, etc. After all, we might record songs & movies on those mediums. And before you ask, no, despite us paying that tax, it's still not legal for us to do so.

Isn't that to compensate artists for the right to copy something for private use. At least that's how I believe it works in Sweden. Unfortunately we also have laws that forbids us to circumvent any form of DRM or copy protection and since nothing is sold without DRM today we are paying for something we can't legally do. And this is something that even extends to external harddrives, MP3-players and I believe smartphones as well (not sure on that though).

That might be, but that begs the question, why? Why do we need to compensate the artists for our own private copying, for our own use? Once we buy their work, ought it not be ours to listen to, however we want?

Private use includes, if I'm not mistaken, the right to copy it to close relatives. And for that I don't think that it's unreasonable to compensate the artist.

However this is now very obsolete and the current implementation is horrendous. But the idea (back in the day) wasn't that terrible.

By the way, almost every country in europe has a TV licence. It definitely can be a good thing, most brits would accept that the TV licence is a good price for the BBC. They provide quality television/radio for minority groups and tend to invest heavily in industries like documentary film-making which might otherwise be ignored in a purely capitalist TV industry.

I agree that a public television channel may be a good idea, and I agree that BBC produces great content, just as our DR does. I also see that your license is ~145£ while ours is ~265£ - not that that makes the argumentative difference though.

My problem is that everybody pays exactly the same, the poor, the students, just as the rich. Everything else in our society is based on a progressive tax, just as most "extras" besides your tax is completely optional. The license on the other hand, that's a flat "tax" that everybody has to pay. With the current rules, very few can honestly say they don't need to pay it. As such - let us pay it over the tax and I'd be fine with it.

Population is obviously a factor because the cost of producing/broadcasting television content is not proportional to population. £145 * 60 million people is a lot more money than £265 * 5 million.

The BBC also makes a lot of money selling it's programming around the world, presumably most Danish TV is in the Danish language so it would be difficult to sell on.

Having said all of this, I'm in Ireland not in Britain. :-) Our TV licence is €160/annum but out national broadcaster airs commercial ads (unlike the BBC).

As the US supreme court noted early in its history, the power to tax is the power to destroy. You will surely forgive me if I am a little skeptical of the government having the power to destroy radio, television, and other communications; note that it's actually been done before.

Meh. The government also has the power to drop nuclear bombs and has done it twice before. Shockingly, we're all still alive and procrastinating on the Internet.

The the typical libertarian appeal to fear of tyranny IMO sheds more heat than light.

In the U.S. we have the Corporation for Public Broadcasting created by an act of Congress. Funds are entirely tax-based and not optional (not even in theory). Americans largely don't have a problem with this due to the high quality of the programming, although there's an outcry of protest every so often.

As an outsider (Aussie), NPR's "All Things Considered" is a great show and well worth your tax dollars ;). Our national radio broadcaster plays it daily.

> "I like how he thinks that Netflix and Redbox are also ripping him off. "

They don't, actually. They just know that if they play the victim, they can shift the eventual compromise further in their favor than if they took a rational position.

Suppose a given policy discussion is a numeric 1-10 scale, and you and I are at 4 and 7 respectively, compromise (as it is seen by voters who expect compromise to be a mid-way point) is 5 or 6. But if I pretend to stake my position as a 10, compromise is suddenly a 7 -- exactly what I wanted in the first place. So long as no-one (e.g. the press) is calling me out for staking out an absurd position, there's no reason not to run this tactic.

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