Re: It's a pointless law
This is exactly the problem. The moral justification for the licensing laws are based on 1950's-1960's tech where the public could not hold onto broadcasts or reproduce recordings.
I recently rented a film from Blockbuster but didn't get around to watching it before I had to take it back, as it was a one-day new release. I paid, therefore I'll watch, by hook or (in this case) by crook. Tech has outpaced concepts around licensing, because licensing hasn't progressed past the VCR so we've ended up with weird and nonsensical laws. When laws don't make sense, people tend to ignore them.
Hopefully Ultraviolet will bring back at least a semblance of sanity, imperfect though it is. I'd like to see UV codes for catchup-tv. I'm a little surprised that the catchup-tv people don't run p2p trackers and seed them with the catchup-tv version of their shows once they have been broadcast.
I suspect that the real problem is that the advertising model doesn't work when you make the advertising really, really obnoxious. I remember (I'm not sure how accurately) the days of ITV having three twenty-second ads every twenty minutes. For that, I'm willing to sit through them. For five or six minutes of ads with an equal amount of programing in between, there isn't a chance I'm going to sit through them and I'll be very active in avoiding them, quite possibly ditching watching the show completely.