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Germany's New Internet License Fee
PapayaSF writes "Beginning January 1st, Germany will require payment of a license fee of 5.52 euros a month on computers and mobile phones that can access TV and radio programs over the Internet. Like the current TV and radio license fees, the money will support national and local public TV and radio stations. German companies with many computers are predictably upset." I'm not sure if this is the same story we discussed in 2004. Did this original fee go through, and this is another fee on top of the original?
There's a similar update of the laws in Sweden. This may very well spread to a lot of countries.
Will the next big thing be an ISP which doesn't give access to the website's of the nations public TV and radio stations' websites?
Or will even The Pirate Bay and Google Video be recognized as sites where you can access TV and radio programs, thus making any such attempts from the ISPs worthless?
In germany,
...
if you own a device that is capable of receiving public tv or radio than you must
pay a fee of 17.52 Euro/Month (for tv and radio) or 5.x for radio.
But you have to pay only for one device even if you own more.
This money is used to fund the state owned public tv and radio stations across the country
To my knowledge, we have the worlds most expensive public tv with a annual budget of
8.2 Billion Euro where 6.5 Billion Euro are coming from the fee (2004 data).
In 2004 the ingenious people of the public broadcasting sector realized that there are
now some people watching tv using their computer and thus are not required to pay.
They got politics to define computers, mobile phones etc. with internet connections as "novel tv devices"
with the intention of getting the people to pay that dumped their regular tvs for
computers.
For some reason this legislation was postponed until 2007 and is now coming into effect.
Particularly annoying is this new fee for companies. Especially small companies as you
have to pay for tv devices used by the company an extra time. This means that if you
work from home and have payed already for your private tv you will have to pay again for
your business computer with an internet connection.
This created some offroar now because since around 2005 a company is mandatorily
required to do the tax stuff via internet, and therefore by law must have a computer
with an internet connection.
The offroar was ongoing and recently the public broadcasting people have agreed to lower the
fee for internet computers from 17.52 (the tv and radio fee) to only 5.x which is the
fee if you have only one radio.
For me, running a small business from home, that means I will have to pay about 23 Euro
a month for public broadcasting
The German TV companies are so generous (from your money :-) ) to transmit their programmes unencrypted on satellite for everyone to view.
So I can receive German TV and can compare it with our Dutch programmes. What I think is:
- the public TV programmes are of good quality. Maybe not appealing to all viewers, but it is clear that care has been put in making them.
- some commercial TV programmes like RTL are not that bad, but the amount of commercials (and especially the length of commercial blocks) is awful.
- other commercial TV programmes (on a lower budget) are just the re-runs of cheap crap that we have here as well.
It is apparent, also when viewing Dutch public TV or the BBC, that public TV has a place. And also that it does not appeal to everyone.