Oh, and…
This concept is a legal one, and if you are prosecuted, the burden of proof will be on them to show that you have used a TV.
??? I thought the BBC was a private company. ???
No, it’s a quasi-autonomous public corporation.
Whether or not I choose to make use of television is purely a private choice. It doesn’t affect other people. Whether or not I choose to drive a car on public roads does have an impact on other people’s lives, since there’s a significant possibility that I may damage property or injure or kill other people in an accident. There’s obviously a public interest in requiring me to have some kind of insurance on my car. I don’t see a public interest in requiring me to pay for television I may not actually be watching.
Oh, that’s very different, then. 
OK. But what about road taxes/vehicle licence fees/etc.?
Okay, so what if the tuner were removed or disabled? Would a fee still be owed?
No.
If I’m going to use the roads which are built and maintained with public resources, it’s only reasonable to help pay for them. The vehicle license fees help to protect my property (imagine the chaos if you had no way of proving that your vehicle was in fact yours), and such a system isn’t going to work unless pretty much every vehicle owner is required to participate, so it’s reasonable to require license fees. I’m not so sure about taxing vehicles merely to raise funds; but we’re dangerously close to hijacking the thread as it is.
I agree it’s not the moral equivalent of Stalinism, but somehow or other it still irks me.
On the other hand, is this really all that different from using public funds to subsidize PBS?
Similar fees in Ireland, Japan and South Africa having already been mentioned, I might add that according to the relevant Wikipedia article almost all European countries (and the major industrialized Asian countries, and some African countries) have TV license fee schemes.
I am a bit in two minds about license fees. I support a degree of public-financed TV but think license fees were an appropriate instrument when just the well-off had TV sets. Nowadays almost everyone has got one, and it would be just as fair (and much more efficient) to replace license fees with a yearly subsidy out of the general budget (as the Netherlands have done). There’d have to be some safeguards against undue government influence on public TV, but that should be doable.
BTW recently the sixteen German states (who regulate TV) amended their treaty on TV licensing (Rundfunkgebührenstaatsvertrag) to include PCs with an Internet connection into the definition of TV sets, effective 1 January 2007 (as these PCs can receive streamed TV programmes offered by the public stations). The states at the time considered it a minor technical point which would affect almost no-one, as PC owners would typically already have a TV set at home, but now it seems that business locations without a TV set but with Internet-connected PCs will be liable to pay TV license fees. The public uproar is slowly growing.
I’d never heard of this, and it feels completely weird to me as an American. But I think quibbling about whether the money is a tax or a fee or something else kind of misses the point. To me it’s entirely a question of value for money – the same question, in short, that you’d have about cable or indeed about free network programming. So is $250 a year worth it for good-quality, advertising-free programming? I’d say that a good argument could be made.
Would BBC have any significant revenues if it weren’t for the fee?
If you mean ‘were the licence fee to disappear tomorrow, what revenue would the BBC have’, the answer is very little. It’s not supposed to be a commercial operation (although has been allowed to develop some commercial revenue, particularly from selling shows overseas), and is not permitted to gain funds for advertising.
If the question is ‘could the BBC gain revenue on the open market as a commercial broadcaster’, I don’t think many people would try to argue that the BBC in anything like its current form would be sustainable in that way. Whether you think that would be a good or bad thing is a major difference of opinion, and of ideology.
If I ever decide to start stealing cable, I’ll keep this in mind.
For TV??? Jeez! In the U.S. you don’t have to go through that rigamarole unless you’re buying a gun. (Or explosives. Or OTC antihistamines, which can be used to make meth . . . .)
IANZIN, thanks for the explanation. What are the requirements for owning a toaster oven? 
Former BBC engineer speaking here.
This whole issue is dead until 2012, when analogue television is due to be switched off, leaving digital only.
The problem is that although many people dislike the licence fee, many more would not be willing to do without the BBC. And as long as analogue TV exists, the BBC cannot exist in recognisable form without the fee.
The difference that all-digital TV makes is that it would become possible to encrypt TV signals securely and then charge directly to have the signals descrambled - if you don’t want to watch the BBC you won’t have to pay, but you don’t get to “cheat” by not paying then watching anyway. Digital technology makes the encryption secure.
Analogue television cannot be securely encrypted. Sky TV tried it in the early days before they went digital, and pirate decryption cards proliferated. Sky had to issue new cards every few weeks, and were finding that the pirates were cracking their new encryption codes within a couple of days. They only survived in the end because they went digital-only, and because they were heavily subsidised by Rupert Murdoch’s other companies.
The difference with the BBC is that they are required by law to supply their programming to the whole country. Therefore for the time being there is a requirement to keep analogue going since not everyone has digital TV yet. There is a nationwide drive to encourage people to switch to digital, but the government doesn’t dare allow analogue to be switched off until at least 95% of homes have digital, and we aren’t there yet.
But once analogue is gone, the political pressure for the BBC to switch to a subscription service will be overwhelming. As soon as everything can be encrypted securely the whole situation changes.
He didn’t say that the law was widely applied, though. I’ve bought TVs without being asked for my address sevearl times. I’m not sure if I’ve ever been asked for my address, in fact. I think they have a database of addresses and just assume that ever one requires a licence.
Sorry, that was in reply to Jodi.