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Comment by moffkalast | Hacker News Reader

Fundamentally because supporting one receiver costs the same as supporting an infinite amount of them, the rest is politics.

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Nobody indeed buys a satellite, but they could have put a tax on receivers to fund the system. In my country they even tax data carriers (CD, HDD, laptop/phone with internal storage, etc.) for the music industry because we may store songs on it... clearly this is achievable, and funding satellites is a much more direct benefit than the bullshit that the music labels keep coming up with so the general public could actually be in favor of it.

If there's a tax for that, then all digital music should be free after that tax.

I'll say. There's been a lot of public debate around this but in the end, nothing changed and people got tired of the topic so here we are

Anyway the point was that taxing receivers would be an option if they had wanted to finance the system, but for some reason they didn't, not so much to discuss this data storage tax to be paid out to the music industry

I don’t see how that would necessarily follow.

I would think the fairest tax rate would be such that giving people the ability to easily copy music would be profit-neutral for music owners/producers.

If so, tax revenues would only have to cover whatever that decreases the profits of music sales by, and that isn’t necessarily 100%.

(Of course, determining lost profits basically is impossible, even ignoring that the ideal solution would determine that for each rights owner in isolation, but that is a different issue. Certainly, requiring all digital music to be free doesn’t avoid that)

I'm Dutch and many people considered this to be a "piracy tax" of sorts. The government and police also weren't in a particular hurry to take care of piracy.

The tax is based on a quirk of copyright law designed by the media industry all the way back in the age of cassette recorders. Music companies realized that people were making copies of their songs from the radio for free (you could put together entire albums if you timed it correctly!) and from the cassettes they bought, and after some mess the "thuiskopie" (home copy) system was born.

Basically, you can make legal copies of any media you have legal access to as long as you pay the fee. This fee goes directly to on organisation (think MPAA but for all artists) which then redistributes the money according to Some Kind Of Model[1]. The fee is part of the sale of any digital or analogue container that can contain copyrighted works; it's a fixed price fee (https://www.thuiskopie.nl/nl/opgave/tarieven). Professionals who won't use their devices to store other people's work can get their money back if they fill in a form and send over the right paperwork, but let's be honest, nobody does this.

For a long time, the de facto interpretation of the thuiskopie law was that a copy you make for yourself (or your direct family/friends) at home is legal. That implied downloading MP3s and other files from the web was also legal [2]. Torrents involve sharing, so they were always off the table, but copies of torrented files given to family was treated like a legal copy. You could still be caught for piracy, but as long as someone else got you all of your pirated disks you were pretty much Technically Okay.

This interpretation was killed off when the media industry won a lawsuit against the government. It was always too good to be true, but it seemed to be one of the ways many pirates were appeased about this law. I'm pretty sure everyone considers this system to be stupid now that it's no longer a de facto piracy license. The copyright lobby is incredibly strong, though, so I doubt we'll see a change any time soon.

The copyright industry gets to charge you twice for the media you listen to. As long as this stupid system remains part of the law, I'm personally opposed to any subsidies for commercial media. If only a politician worth voting for actually cared about this crap...

[1]: Yes, this is legal, though I still don't know why.

[2]: Software has always been excluded from this, though; downloading software and games was never part of the deal, and software companies can't claim their take from the Thuiskopie system

Either way we can’t really charge people for seeing electromagnetic radiation.

I'm pretty sure the British TV license says otherwise, although in practice it's an often abused extortion mechanism. It's quite possible to detect dedicated tuned receivers as well.

In fact, in many countries pointing your SDR at 2G/3G/4G/5G frequencies is basically an instant felony, even without attempts to decrypt the traffic. If you get caught watching such traffic, you'll pay much more than just a small tax.

You mean listening to those frequencies, not broadcasting? I didn't know that was illegal anywhere, besides maybe military or other government bands.

You pay for the programmes, not the broadcast, obviously. You can just say "I don't need a TV license" online and usually that's the end of it. https://tvlicensing.co.uk/noTV

And in many other countries the "TV license" is just included in general tax; in e.g. when the TV license was abolished in the Netherlands taxes went up by 1.1% to compensate. In Germany it's €220/year/person (not household) regardless of whether you have a TV or not. This way you don't pay for a product I don't use.

As if there's no way to codify that a device determining a spacetime location from GPS signals is a taxed good.

To give another example, you used not to have to pay public broadcasting tax in Germany if you didn't have a TV or radio in your household. I would be highly amused to see you try to argue "it's just an electromagnetic radiation plotter, what do you mean tele, eh, vision?" to an unamused government official.

> Nobody indeed buys a satellite, but they could have put a tax on receivers to fund the system.

They could not put a special tax on receivers, let the manufacture and sale and commercial use of receivers create economic activity, and then tax that economic activity through, e.g., personal and corporate income tax, and use tht to fund the system.

If the fundamental part of your argument played any role in medicine, then all the >$1M cancer treatments would be practically free too.

Pharmaceutical companies are not charging for the cost it took to develop that drug, but for the rolling cost it’ll take to develop future ones.

Also CEO bonuses

Not necessarily, incredibly large amounts of money pharmaceutical companies spend is actually spent on advertising their products to maintain their cash flow. Examples can be found online but this source [1], which is obviously biased, shows the statistics for the biggest companies in a nice list.

The (hundreds of) millions spent on bonuses are nothing compared to the billions spent on making sure your doctor recommends UmbrellaCorp PainAWay™ over a generic brand that will cost you a tenth of the price [2]. That includes not just TV ads, but also buying conference tickets and free lunches for doctors; anything to make sure they get the upper hand.

[1]: https://www.csrxp.org/icymi-new-study-finds-big-pharma-spent...

[2]: It should be noted that some generics can work less effectively or cause additional side effects in some people, but for many types of medication the difference is minimal and sometimes the big-brand products even come with more side effects than their competitors' product

In non-US major economies, aren't they?

Good point actually, in medicine it's usually the high insurance risk that makes for the high costs I think. Interesting that nobody ever sues GPS providers for their connection dropping out or degrading, resulting in lost business. I'm sure it's happened but nobody would think of doing it.

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