You don't need a license to own a TV that's right, but damn if you accidentally tune it to ITV4 for 5 seconds while hooking up the DVD player, or if you click on a BBC News (or Sky news for that matter) live stream on the web in your unlicensed house, you are a criminal right there. Literalty that is a criminal offence. Is that proportionate?
Surely that would require you to accidentally connect it to an aerial or satellite dish and then accidentality select the tuning option on your TV.
Given that we no longer have analogue broadcasts and you're unlikely to pick up a fuzzy signal with a HDMI cable you might as well just "accidentally" bittorrent the thing you want to watch in 4K and have done with it.
"Yes your Honour I did just happen to accidentally watch 3 weeks of Tour de France highlights on ITV4 at 7.00pm each night whilst connecting up my DVD player"
...frankly, there are more believable vacuum cleaner "accidents" reported in A&E on a Saturday night. :P
OK I get it. How about a slightly more beleivable scenario: your license elapses and you choose not to renew. You didn't disconnect the aerial yet. You switch on the TV to watch a DVD, it tunes automatically to the last channel. Oops now you're a criminal.
Or even more realistically, read some of the news articles about how most TV license convictions are women with low incomes who got bullied by the enforcers who came to the door into signing a confession that yes they did watch the TV for a week after the license ran out.
