The Law is an Ass….Excellent!

When Microsoft decided to bundle Windows Media Player as part of Windows 98 it is unlikely that they considered what the effect on UK Licensing policy might be. In fact it appears to have taken several years for the government to latch on to the possibilities.

Windows Media Player includes support for streaming video. Eh? In English this means you can watch television over the internet. All that is needed is a co-operative TV station that feeds its output onto the internet and you can log on from anywhere in the world. To be honest the picture quality is not usually very good and things may freeze or drop out entirely. Ten years ago most people were still using dial up modems to connect to the internet, so the threat posed by Internet TV would not have seemed very credible. By the time the powers that be woke up to what was going on, it turned out that most of the country already had a PC with bundled software installed that could be used to watch internet TV.

In 2003 the government reformed the law to keep up to date with the latest developments in technology. You might expect that this would have resolved the situation. This blog thinks that they have made a complete horlicks of things. That is no bad thing for us though; the situation is wide open to exploit.

If you have installed a television set that can pick up signals from the nearest transmitter mast then you need a licence. If you have installed a PC that can receive streaming video from an internet TV feed then a licence is not needed. You might think that all technologies would be equal in the eyes of the law but clearly this is not the case. Obviously you need a licence to actually watch live TV over the internet, but how is this policed? Do TV Licensing have a database of which IP address belongs to which licence? It seems unlikely.

In an even more abstruse and difficult to enforce distinction, the law distinguishes between a live streaming feed and download of a pre-recorded file. Internet TV without a licence may not be legal but YouTube, BBC iPlayer and video podcasting can all be accessed as much as you like without a licence in sight.

How did we get here? The point is worth examining. Obviously the government could simply require that a TV Licence is purchased by anyone that connects to the internet. This would not be popular. In particular "Internet tax" (as we shall call this idea) would offend small businesses and students. Fortunately these two groups are fairly vocal and have, for the most part, sympathetic support from the wider community. The government simply will not risk upsetting two groups of people that might influence wider public opinion.

Some will say that the legality of using video podcasting without a TV Licence is a technical loophole that could be closed at any time in a review of the regulations. My argument is that the loophole is the result of a deliberate choice by the government. The existing legislation is a compromise and the circumstances that led to the compromise have not changed. In fact the policy of 'the corporation' appears to be not to draw attention to the problem in the hope that people will not notice.

Unfortunately for them, some of us have noticed.