I'll comment on your post, here, which has some very
good points.
Mrs. Lynnette Annabel Smith writes:
Hello Martin and all
As I said, I think, Martin, that you may not be aware of the fact that we
have to pay a license fee to watch this sort of stuff. That license is
rigorously enforced and breaking the rules leads to a 1 thousand Pound
fine, plus a 28 day prison sentence and a conviction as a criminal if
caught.
The IF signals of the TV or video equipment are used by detector vans
with specialist equipment which go around at all hours of the day and
night. They check every street at random times and the vehicles are
unmarked; so you can't tell when they are there. That fact, the fact that
we have to pay for something which others are trying to get for free, is
the only reason why I am in favour of the ban.
Actually what you have there is a forced subscription.
The detector vans and the data base and infrastructure to
support them plus all the staff to occupy them is utter lunacy.
I'd like to laugh and say something like, Oh! those British.
How weird, but that's totally missing the point as to how far
governments and private industry will go sometimes to enforce
behavior that is not voluntary or unpopular or both.
It must cost a fortune to outfit those vehicles, pay the
drivers, technicians, engineers and computer programmers and I
am sure things go wrong from time to time like any good
bureaucracy.
I am surprised that England has not done one of the
following things:
Abolish the license fee and all compliance
infrastructure and collect the taxes some other way that you
can't avoid such as sales taxes or the VAT.
They could encrypt the television signal so that you
must pay for it just like satellite reception. Again, axe the
enforcement infrastructure because it wouldn't matter. Didn't
pay? it doesn't play.
Some of the other TV
channels in the UK have other reasons for banning access to their
content. And the primary of those is copyright. They take out viewing
rights agreements with the owners of the content, and the production
companies who sell it on to the TV stations. Those agreements contain
copyright clauses which prohibit the TV channels from making their
content freely available. That, and that only, is the reason why they
prohibit access to overseas individuals. I've done some checking and
actually, the network providers of VPN and other access points are
themselves liable for prosecution it seems if their clients use their
facilities to access copyright material. I don't know what the situation
is regarding the person themselves; but my information is that the
provider of the services usually makes it quite clear to people who
subscribe that their agreement is that they don't use the service for any
illegal activities. Therefore, if the provider is made aware of such
abuse by the broadcaster or copyright holder, they apparently take a very
dim view of it and take the appropriate measures. This is only what I'm
being told; I am no expert.
Here, local television stations broadcast their signal
over the air, through cable systems and, here's the problem, via
satellite for viewers who live either too far away from the city
to receive a proper signal over the air or for people who
subscribe to satellite and need some way to get signals from the
nearest city, also.
I could, in theory, watch the local TV of New York City
even though it is 2000 miles away but one is not really supposed
to do that because local stations sell advertising that I don't
receive. It's a variation on who pays for what, again.
The signals are encrypted and the company sells you a
decoder for your area.
There is a black market which I truly do not know
anything about in which people sell cracked decoders for
somewhere between what a legal system would cost and free and
federal agents usually find these people and they are in big
trouble when cought.
It is not a huge industry, here, but you hear about it
from time to time when somebody gets cought.
One of the satellite companies did a very clever thing a
few years ago.
There were a bunch of illegal receivers out there and a
large number of folks had bought them because of a premium
sports package that they were stealing. The satellite company
knew what type of cards the pirates had so they sent a short
program, a few bytes at a time, to all these folks while, at the
same time, they sent their paying customers new cards that were
immune from what was about to happen.
Each day, they sent up a few more bytes of the program
which the receivers wrote to the illegal cards. On one of the
biggest Sunday football days of the year, they sent the final
few bytes of the program which caused all the illegal smart
cards to go in to an endless loop of nothing which effectively
killed the decoders.
