For a time France was considering a "Cultural tax" to fight against torrenting etc. The idea was to pay a fixed fee like 10 or 15€ a month that gave you access to everything in legal streaming. It would have been perfect and people would have pay for it instead of illegally downloading.

Then Netflix came and took that market, then all others mega corporations wanted their share of the money and streaming went to shit and sent us back to the initial issue.

The problem today is that even if we had such a general platform, plenty of right owners would refuse it to favor their own network platform.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

For a time France was considering a “Cultural tax” to fight against torrenting etc

Most European countries have a "private copying levy", which is basically a tax on storage mediums (HDDs, SSDs, etc, including those inside computers and phones). So as far as I'm concerned I'm already paying for my torrented content.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

True, this one is named "taxe sur la copie privée" in France.

But they wanted to do something else, a kind of super powerful public Netflix paid by taxes.