Slashdot Mirror
UK Proposes Broadband Expansion, Plus a Music and Film Tax
Wowsers writes "First the tech illiterates in the UK government want to extend broadband internet connections to every home, whether it makes sense or not, then at the same time they propose a £20 per year (approx $29US) broadband tax which they claim will pay the record and film industries for their failed business models. Coincidence the two proposals are linked? And why should people be forced to pay for the failed film and music industries?"
This article is a bit mis-leading. Frighteningly, a more accurate account actually makes it sound even worse.
The government is planning to force ISPs to extend 2Mbps service to all locations with-in their domain.
The government also plans to force ISPs to "provide data about serial copyright-breakers to music and film companies..."
The government would create an agency to over-see this transfer of data about music/film copyright infringers, and the ISPs would flip the bill for the costs of operating this new agency.
It works like this. Everyone in the UK who owns a T.V. has to buy a licence for £131.50 ($187.2). The money raised all goes to fund the BBC, which is "non-commercial" ie no ads etc. This covers the cost of some 7 TV channels and numerous national and local radio channels, as well as the BBCi online services. The BBC also gains revenue from sales of it's programmes abroad, and from a commercial merchandising arm. None of the licence fee goes to any other broadcaster. ITV, Channel Four, Channel Five, B-Sky-B (Sky) and Vigin media are all commercial operations and depend on advertising revenue etc for their income.
Having said all that, I don't see that this is relevent to a "Broadband Tax" at all. This is just another misguided nonsense from this misguided and non-sensical govenrment that we Brits are currently enduring.
Smivs on the intertubes!
No, the BBC is funded by taxing everyone in the UK who has a equipment that they use to watches or records TV signals as they are shown.
The difference is that the TV License has a benefit (it lets you have a TV, it funds an organisation that provides the only watchable TV channel, and it funds some decent UK shows that aren't complete drivel* and which are an hour long if they are scheduled for an hour, rather than being 40 minutes long in an hour long slot) while the broadband tax will be levied on people to cover the illegal actions of others even if the person being taxed isn't doing anything illegal themselves.
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* Channel 4 has "Big Brother", BBC produces things like QI. If I had to specifically decide which my license fee went to and which producers had to be locked away for eternity for crimes against TV and sanity, the Big Brother people would definitely have to be the ones locked in the Big Brother house along with the mindless contestants of each series they've made so far.
I'd just like to say that I don't think the TV license should be called a tax; even if it's virtually equivalent to one.
Taxes are collected and administered by the Government. TV license fees are not.
There's a good and important reason for that: To keep public television free of governmental/political interference.
Calling the TV license a tax, as well as referring to the BBC and other (west-)European public TV companies as 'government-owned' and similar gives the inaccurate picture that they're under some kind of direct government control, which they are not.
So let me get this straight.
1. You tax the people. 2. You give the tax to the record companies. 3. The record companies use this tax to sue the very people who were taxed.
Isn't that just a roundabout way of forcing the defendant to pay all the legal bills regardless of the outcome?
No its worse than that - it gets paid twice. Once by all the innocent people and then by the guy that they use the money to catch.