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Thrifty, Anonymous Benefactor Backs Up BBC Websites Before They Go Dark
revealingheart writes "The BBC is set to close down 200 of its websites in the near future as part of cost-cutting measures. Hearing that 172 of these sites would be deleted from the Web entirely, an anonymous individual has taken matters into his or her own hands. The result is a BitTorrent file that anyone can download to store a backup of these 'lost' websites forever. The cost of the project? Apparently no more than $3.99 for a VPS server to crawl and retrieve all the sites."
A tax doesn't have to be universal, unless you're also going to argue that the tax on cigarettes and alcohol aren't really taxes because only smokers and drinkers pay them. The licence fee is a compulsory tax on anyone who watches broadcast TV, whether or not they consume or even care about BBC services. Now I'm not saying that I don't enjoy BBC output, or even that I necessarily resent paying the licence fee, but please don't try to use weasel words and pretend it's something it isn't. It might be a special purpose tax and the money it generates might be ring fenced, but it's a tax and the BBC is a public body.
But in the USA you do something like that you end up in court.
"But your honor, I was only trying to help them."
"Your honor, he has no RIGHT to help us!"
But seriously it would be a great clause in the copyright scheme that if a copyrighted work is taken out of distribution it should automatically go public domain. Otherwise publishers can simply delete history like those old racist Warner Brothers videos they keep taking down from Youtube.
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A tax doesn't have to be universal, unless you're also going to argue that the tax on cigarettes and alcohol aren't really taxes because only smokers and drinkers pay them.
You seem to be overly worried about whether something can be called a "tax" or not based on whether it's compulsory (I'd like to propose, then, that food purchases are taxes because they are compulsory for survival). Consider instead the allocation of funds.
Scrapping Trident is a valid cost-cutting measure when the government has decided that it's overspending on unnecessary shit during a recession: if you scrap Trident, you suddenly have a few 10s of billions more GBP to allocate other than against an imaginary enemy who is already being sufficiently resisted.
Even tax on fags and booze goes to central government. The extra taxation isn't allocated for health or policiing services for cancer patients and drunks.
But, as you say, BBC money is separately funded. If you shut down a few small BBC web sites, you achieve precisely nothing to help anyone. The money won't go to firing one civil service PPP management bureaucrat or tearing up one agency contract in favour of well-trained full time employees.
What is more, I regard the licence fee as the cost the viewer pays for (i) the content produced by the BBC; (ii) even if he chooses not to watch the BBC, the permission given by the people to private broadcasters to use parts of the e-m spectrum (and other artificial/natural monopolies) to broadcast stuff in their interests. The "cost" in this case is the right for the people to provide a counterpoint - something sorely lacking, in, say, the bastion of free press that is the USA.
The BBC is (ideally) the people's counterbalance to the freedom of the press belonging to the owners of the presses.
Theres a very noticable left wing bias at the BBC, especially on Radio 4. We need right wingers like murdoch to provide balance.