WoW! a license to watch television! Long Live the Indian Democracy!
Guess What! The government has been giving free televisions off!
Really? Well I guess first it's free, and then when you are all hooked and pacified, it will cost!
And to the non-norwegians here, you have it easy 
Our license is kind of similar to the UK license, except you have to pay regardless of which channels you watch. Even if all you have is a VCR which contains a tuner, you should pay as if you have a colour TV! (it's cheaper to have a black/white TV lol). You don't need a TV, but of course it would be kind of pointless with a VCR without a TV. Not that they care about that.
Even after they went with digital broadcasting, which requires an additional digital decoder, you must pay if you got a TV even if you don't have any digital decoder. The legal mumbo is that its not a license to watch TV, but rather a license to have a TV (even if borrowed). It is an additional tax that coincidentally also is collected by the NRK (Norwegian national broadcasting cooperation).
On the other hand, there are up-sides too like with the UK license. I guess it's also nice to watch without being interrupted by commercials every 15 minutes or so. But it's not like they are entirely without commercials anyway. Not that I've watched them for years, i don't have a TV anymore (or a VCR for that matter :P).
Still, I thought Norway was bad. Denmark is worse! They have a "media license" (if memory serves, but same same thing at least) on the internet. I guess just in case you happened to surfe on the Danish broadcasting servers to watch something.. (They could't think to make it a paysite like most others?). How they managed that is beyond me.