The most hardcore pirates rarely feel the need to justify their consumption habits. For those who are a little less militant, reasons to pirate are in plentiful supply.
Whether it’s availability, price, inconvenience, not enough choice, or too many choices, there always a reason for piracy being the more attractive offer.
For their part, opponents often dismiss these reasons as convenient excuses, places to hide while defending what some believe is straightforward theft. Take the same stance against a 3pm blackout ‘excuse’ and the argument quickly hits a dead end.
Reason’s Big Brother: Justification
The 3pm blackout refers to the period when broadcasters such as SKY cannot broadcast live football to fans in the UK.
Running from 2.45pm until 5.15pm on Saturdays, the ‘closed period’ was originally put in place to ensure that the draw of major games on TV couldn’t deprive clubs in lower leagues of their significantly smaller audiences.
Support for ‘grassroots’ football may at times be presented as benevolent, charitable even, but a failure to nurture home-grown talent risks reliance on expensive imports later down the road. Short-term ‘gains’ for not reinvesting money back into the game would’ve been worth around £170 million to the Football Association according to its last set of accounts.
Grassroots engagement, not to mention engaging the entire country in football, generation after generation, is fundamental to ensuring healthy match attendances at every level; that leads to lucrative broadcasting rights upon which the ecosystem relies.
The 3pm blackout protects all of that, at the expense of locking all clubs out of a local live broadcasting market, in which they could enjoy exclusivity. Yet through artificial restriction that prohibits the existence of a potentially lucrative market, fans happy to hand over their cash have become increasingly frustrated.
Less invested fans in overseas markets are not only free to watch matches during the blackout, they do so legally at a fraction of the prices charged in the UK generally.
So, if no money is made from UK fans during the blackout, piracy could be viewed as not just a reasonable option, but a logical common sense alternative.
Can IPTV pirates offering 3pm matches hurt a market that doesn’t even exist? And when fans watch matches, is that still straightforward theft from the Premier League, for example, and if so, what exactly are they being deprived of?
“We Run On English Football Time”
For the clearest example yet that exploiting a market that doesn’t exist is a serious crime in the UK, look no further than pirate IPTV service Flawless TV.
After its operator quipped that the Flawless team “run on English football time” and it was privately recognized that the 3pm blackout was great for business, criminal prosecutions concluded that rights can’t be exploited without first obtaining permission from the rightsholder.
Excuses, reasons, and justification ultimately proved no match for custodial sentences totaling more than 30 years which in practical terms, failed to solve the problem. Pirates don’t just exploit artificial restrictions, they thrive on them. If there was a gap in the market, it didn’t stay that way for long.
Light at the End of the Tunnel
Speaking to the press at Sky’s Premier League launch event this week, Sky Sports chief Jonathan Licht added momentum to what some believe is the beginning of the end for football’s 3pm TV ‘blackout’.
“There’s clearly a direction of travel and lots of conversation about Saturday 3pms, and I think that will perhaps increase as we go through this cycle,” Licht said. “It’s a conversation that’s coming.”
Talking is clearly important but admitting that a problem exists should make the conversation a little less complicated. This week, Licht effectively admitted that the restriction fuels piracy, arguably football’s biggest problem.
“It’s fair to say that 3pms have been a point for piracy coming into this market from various places,” he said.
Piracy Profits From Exclusivity
Some might argue that refusal to serve an exclusive market is why exclusive markets shouldn’t be allowed to exist. That’s a whole new conversation but purely from the perspective of loyal fans, it actually does something far worse; it provides unrivaled justification for piracy and a gateway to even more.
When fans offer their money and it’s refused year after year, pirate subscriptions and web-based streaming sites don’t just solve the 3pm Saturday problem, they continue to work all week.
“There’s a real concern that despite the illegality and links to organized crime, [piracy] has been normalized. That’s dangerous for everyone, the industry and rights holders,” Licht said. So what can be done?
“It’s all of our responsibility in the industry to tackle piracy, whether that’s lobbying big tech or engaging government,” Licht said.
Controversial, perhaps, but is listening to the fans still an option?
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From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
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