Am Tuesday 22 February 2005 17:51 schrieb Kimmo Koivisto: > On Tuesday 22 February 2005 15:18, Niklas Peinecke wrote: > > You surely live in Orwell's own country! In Germany, there is no > > such information chain -- yet, although I think the GEZ (our tv > > licensing institution over here) would love to have such a thing. > > Finland is the promised land of all kind of taxes, tv licensing and > copyright licenses from playing copyrighted music. Even churches need > to pay licenses when people sing copyrighted hymn, tax drivers need > to pay licenses if they have their radios on when they have customers > etc. > We have to pay fees when we purchase empty CD's or DVD's, because we > could use those to record copyrighted music. We also have to pay > copyright fees from ipods and other devices, that can contain > copyrighted material, even digital set top boxes with hard drivers :) > > Public television and radio organisation (YLE) is unprofitable, they > spend more money that they can collect, so fees are increasing every > year. Now the tv license fee is about 190 euros. > > Welcome to Finland :) If in exchange for those fees you become immune to the molestations of the various content-controlling industry militias, I'd say you're getting a good deal. In many of the other countries nowadays you're putting one foot in prison by downloading a music file (I'm exaggerating here, but only slightly). Cheers, Roland
