I think they may have a get-out in that they can use money they raise from their commercial ventures like foreign sales to fund non-TV and radio ventures that the licence fee doesn't cover. DRM seems like a sensible way to preserve the income from those sales to me. Now, if they used that money to speed up development of Dirac and create their own cross-platform content protection system instead of making Little Britain clones, then we'd all be happy.

Also, I ditched my telly two years ago and after informing a lovely lady called Astrid at the TV Licensing call centre of the fact, I haven't heard a peep out of them.