Adrian Weckler

Like I remember the days of, you know, music and video piracy 10, 15 years ago.

And you would have ministers like Labour's Sean Sherlock, for example.

And there was a political...

wind behind the drive to fight that type of piracy.

We got a three strikes law in Ireland where if you were detected downloading pirated material, you could be cut off from your broadband connection.

There isn't the same wind at the moment for some reason.

I'm not quite sure why that is.

I think maybe it's because

The majority of the content that is seen to be pirated here maybe comes from non-domestic sources, perhaps, although the GAA and FAI might argue with that.

But back in those days, it was maybe Irish artists, music artists, for example, maybe had a wider purchase on political consensus.

I think you're right.

I think even talking to the stakeholders involved, the people who are trying to change the law, the people who are chasing after the dodgy box distributors and to a lesser degree, the end users, I think they would agree with that as well.

And that leaves them trying, well, first of all, trying to get the law changed, but that also leaves them trying to do things like focus on the distributors and the sellers, as they call it, the supply chain, but also this idea of,

tracking um who is buying the dodgy boxes and who's selling them by going to things like social media it's something we reported on a few months ago this guy in particular was considering you know hiring investigators and and maybe you know seeing who was expressing interest in buying you know modified uh internet boxes or at the time fire sticks although the fire stick uh

has been modified in recent months with a new operating system.

I'm sure anyone out there who knows someone who has a dodgy box will have heard howls of complaint because the new Vega operating system on the Fire Stick isn't as friendly toward illegal modification as the old stick was.

Nothing to do with Amazon, not Amazon's fault, but that's what the Fire Stick was sometimes used for.

It's small to medium sized cottage industries.

So if a few months ago in the High Court in Dublin, Sky had a civil prosecution against a number of these small to medium sized resellers of dodgy boxes and dodgy box streams.

And they were, you know, Irish guys and, you know, several hundred thousand euro each they were on the hook for.