There was a fascinating, if somewhat under-played, result in this week’s Ireland Thinks Opinion Poll for the Sunday Independent. It came on the subject of so-called “dodgy boxes”, which permit people who acquire them to access premium TV packages (like Sky Sports) without paying the full subscription.
Asked whether they own a dodgy box, 14% of respondents said that they did. If that figure is accurate, it represents an enormous loss of revenue for the makers of premium television.
Asked if they would consider getting a dodgy box, 35% of respondents said that they would, while 49% said that they would not.
But here’s the kicker: Asked if people who own dodgy boxes should be prosecuted for their crime, only 18% of people said that they should be prosecuted, while a staggering 64% of respondents said that they should not.
Let’s make no bones about this: “Dodgy boxes” are illegal. They facilitate what is an act of piracy or, in plainer language, theft. Yet here is a crime that almost two thirds of Irish people think should not be prosecuted. Why?
The obvious explanation is that Irish people think of the theft of premium TV content as being in a different category of crime to others. First, on the grounds that it is either a “victimless” crime or on the grounds that it is a crime that is justified on the ideological basis that things like elite sport should not be behind a paywall in the first place and that those who profit from putting them behind a paywall do not deserve much sympathy.
Second, that the dodgy box and the non-payment of a television licence are in the same family of offence. It would be fascinating to see if there was a difference between the number of people who say that TV licence evasion should not be prosecuted and those who say the same about dodgy box ownership.
Third, perhaps, that the sheer scale of the problem makes prosecuting it a waste of garda resources.
I have written before on these pages and elsewhere that I am a conscious television licence evader. By contrast, I am a paying customer to Sky Ireland for their premium television package, which is substantially more expensive than the TV licence. Naturally, therefore, I have come to the self-serving view that licence evasion and dodgy box ownership are entirely different crimes.
The television licence is a single, mandatory, state-enforced subsidy to a single media company that is imposed regardless of whether you consume the content. RTE, unlike Sky (or other premium TV providers) is entirely immune from the laws of supply and demand: They are not obliged to produce good television in order to survive. And as has been recently demonstrated, even when people refuse to pay the licence fee, the Government is happy to top RTE up with direct funding to ensure that the broadcaster never suffers the consequences of its own actions.
In practical terms, TV licence evasion does not impact RTE’s bottom line. Nothing RTE does impacts RTE’s bottom line.
By contrast, premium TV providers are in a competitive market. Because they have to sell their product, they have to invest in a product that is worth buying. That is why they put such a big premium on sports and prestige drama. They increasingly have to compete with streaming services offered by enormous internet companies like Amazon and Apple.
So here’s the equation: Depriving RTE of revenue does not impact the bottom line in Montrose, since RTE is entirely immune to competition. But stealing from the providers of premium TV services actually does do harm to those companies in terms of the quality of their products, the investments they make, and the people they employ.
There’s another difference, too: Not paying your TV licence is an individual decision from which nobody profits other than (marginally) the person making the protest by withholding payment. By contrast, nobody gets a dodgy box by themselves. Dodgy box provision is a large and organised criminal enterprise, which, in the era of the internet, puts people at risk. The data, security, and personal details of dodgy box purchasers is at risk. The profits from the sale of these boxes go to people who have created nothing beyond a mechanism for theft. The people organising the dodgy box networks and profiting from them are making large revenues off the back of other people’s enterprise and innovation, and may also be profiting from illegally targeting – in some cases – their own customers.
It is probable that the public does not think about or consider these nuances when considering the difference between the two crimes. But even at that, the widespread tolerance of the crime in Ireland is surprising, and tells us a lot about the still-widespread ambivalence about the law in our country.