Move to curb pay-TV piracy

Date: 15/02/1996

By Fiona McHugh

TOUGH new measures are needed to stamp out television piracy in the digital age, the European Commission will warn EU governments in a Green Paper due to be adopted in the coming weeks.

Anxious to help Europe's much-heralded information society to its feet, the Commission will call for appropriate laws to ensure that manufacturers, importers and distributors of illegal decoders are brought swiftly and firmly to justice.

But it will not spell out what shape those laws should take.

Pay-TV, the fastest growing area of broadcasting, is expected to flower in the digital era, generating billions of ecu in annual revenue and providing countless new jobs.

New television services such as near-video-on-demand, allowing viewers to select when and what they want to watch from a menu of programmes, and teleshopping, which enables them to shop from the comfort of their home, are already hitting the market and their use should soon be widespread.

With revenue from advertising limited, however, firms providing those services will have to count on subscription fees in order to make money.

Clients who have paid up will be given special decoders, such as those already being used by BSkyB and Canal+, to decrypt scrambled signals.

Digital equipment, which allows far greater compression of information than analogue does, will encourage a proliferation of new television services, but will also provide unprecedented opportunities for pirates. Industry experts predict the sale of cheap illegal decoding systems will become big business.

The Commission acknowledges in its Green Paper on 'encrypted services' that if piracy is not controlled, the profitability of the pay-TV business will be undermined, potential investors in new services scared off and the growth of the information society stunted.

While technical security devices can and will be built into subscription broadcasting systems, they will have to be complemented by appropriate legal measures.

At the moment, a patchwork of laws exists in the EU. While some countries have tight anti-hacking laws, others, such as Germany, have none at all, making it difficult for operators to launch new services across the whole of Europe.

The Commission's paper insists that measures to prevent signal theft should be introduced on an EU-wide basis rather than nationally, since broadcasts cross borders, but is vague about the likely shape of such measures.

It suggests the banning of illegal decoders and says manufacturers, importers and distributors of such devices should be prosecuted.

But it does not say whether the possession of illegal devices should be criminalised, opening the way for citizens who buy and use unauthorised decoders to face legal action.

Nor does the paper specify what sanctions, penal or administrative, should be introduced, or whether television operators should be allowed to sue pirates for revenue losses.

But the fact that it leaves a number of questions unanswered is not surprising, as it is intended merely as a discussion paper to which all interested parties will be invited to respond in the coming months. It nevertheless represents a decisive opening gambit in the war against piracy.

The paper is just one of a series of discussion documents intended to establish how order might be brought into a potentially unruly information age.

A Green Paper on new services is also in the pipeline and the results of a debate on copyright law in the information age are currently being assessed.

Given the fact that many of these services are still being developed, the Commission is groping in the dark to a large extent. It has a delicate balancing act to perform, ensuring the information society does not spin out of control, while at the same time taking care not to smother new services at birth with a surfeit of EU laws.