Pirate Decryption - Political Issues

Political Issues

In some countries such as Canada and many Caribbean nations (except for the Dominican Republic), the black market in satellite TV piracy is closely tied to the gray market activity of using direct broadcast satellite signals to watch broadcasts intended for one country in some other, adjacent country. Many smaller countries have no domestic DBS operations and therefore few or no legal restrictions on the use of decoders which capture foreign signals.

The refusal of most providers to knowingly issue subscriptions outside their home country leads to a situation where pirate decryption is perceived as being one of the few ways to obtain certain programming. If there is no domestic provider for a channel, a grey market (subscribed using another address) or black market (pirate) system is prerequisite to receive many specific ethnic, sport or premium movie services.

Pirate or grey-market reception also provides viewers a means to bypass local blackout restrictions on sporting events and to access hard-core pornography where some content is not otherwise available.

The grey market for US satellite receivers in Canada at one point was estimated to serve as many as several hundred thousand English-speaking Canadian households. Canadian authorities, acting under pressure from cable companies and domestic broadcasters, have made many attempts to prevent Canadians from subscribing to US direct-broadcast services such as Liberty Media's DirecTV and Echostar's Dish Network.

While litigation has gone as far as the Supreme Court of Canada, no judicial ruling has yet been made on whether such restrictions violate the safeguards of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms which are intended to protect freedom of expression and prevent linguistic or ethnic discrimination. Domestic satellite and cable providers have adopted a strategy of judicial delay in which their legal counsel will file an endless series of otherwise-useless motions before the courts to ensure that the proponents of the grey-market systems run out of money before the "Charter Challenge" issue is decided.

According to K. William McKenzie, the Orillia Ontario lawyer who won the case in the Supreme Court of Canada, a consortium headed by David Fuss and supported by Dawn Branton and others later launched a constitutional challenge to defeat section 9(1)(c) of the Radiocommunication Act on the basis that it breached the guarantee of Freedom of Expression enshrined in section 2 (c) of the Canadian Charter of Rights.

The evidence compiled by Mr. McKenzie from his broadcasting clients in opposition to this challenge was so overwhelming that it was abandoned and the Court ordered that substantial costs be paid by the applicants.

In most cases, broadcast distributors will require a domestic billing address before issuing a subscription; post boxes and commercial mail receiving agencies are often used by grey-market subscribers to foreign providers to circumvent this restriction.

The situation in the US itself differs as it is complicated by the legal question of subscriber access to distant local TV stations. Satellite providers are severely limited in their ability to offer subscriptions to distant locals due to the risk of further lawsuits by local affiliates of the same network in the subscribers home designated market area. California stations have sued satellite providers who distributed New York signals nationally, as the distant stations would have an unfair advantage by broadcasting the same programming three hours earlier.

There is also a small "reverse gray market" for Canadian signals, transmitted with a footprint which sends full-strength DBS signals to many if not all of the contiguous 48 US states. This is desirable not only to receive Canadian-only content, but because some US-produced programs air in Canada in advance of their US broadcast. The question of signal substitution, by which Canadian cable and satellite providers substitute the signal of a local or domestic channel over a foreign or distant channel carrying the same program, is rendered more complex by the existence of a reverse grey market. Signal substitution had already been the cause of strong diplomatic protests by the United States, which considers the practice to constitute theft of advertising revenue.

The lack of domestic competition for premium movie channels in Canada is one factor encouraging grey-market reception; language is another key issue as most Spanish-language programming in North America is on the US system and most French-language programming is on the Canadian system. A larger selection of sports and ethnic programming is also available to grey-market subscribers.

It could be said that the 1000-channel universe is a "reality" in North America, but only for the signal pirates as many legal and geographic restrictions are placed on the ability to subscribe to many if not most of the physically available channels.

Other countries such as Nicaragua during Sandinista rule, Cuba, Iran (Islamic Republic of Iran) and Afghanistan during Taliban rule and Iraq during the Saddam Hussein regime, have attempted to prohibit their citizens from receiving any satellite broadcasts from foreign sources.

The situation in Europe differs somewhat, due to the much greater linguistic diversity in that region and due to the use of standardized DVB receivers capable of receiving multiple providers and free-to-air signals. North American providers normally lock their subscribers into "package receivers" unable to tune outside their one package; often the receivers are sold at artificially low prices and the subscription cost for programming is increased in order to favour new subscribers over existing ones. Providers are also notorious for using sales tactics such as bundling, in which to obtain one desired channel a subscriber must purchase a block of anywhere from several to more than a hundred other channels at substantial cost.

Many European companies like British Sky Broadcasting prohibit subscriptions outside of the UK and Ireland. But other satellite providers like Sky Deutschland do sell yearly subscription cards legally to customers in other European countries without the need for an address or other personal information. The latter also applies to virtually all the Adult channel cards sold in Europe.