HBO initiates piracy crackdown by going to police
After breaking into the networks of cable TV operators and stealing their signals for years without much threat of punishment, pirates may soon be walking the plank.
In May, pay TV station HBO told Warsaw police about the distribution of counterfeit filters that allow its signal to be decoded. Five weeks later, the prosecutor's office started legal proceedings against the accused, who had earlier been detained by police. The alleged thieves, from Warsaw and Radom, are thought to have sold the filters at Warsaw's Volumen market, an apparent haven for the distribution of stolen electronic equipment.
"We have criminal cases pending against distributors and retailers of such illegal products," said Phil Roter, the managing director of HBO in Poland. "That's the process that the cable industry needs to go through."
According to market insiders, now might be the right time for TV operators and distributors to finally tackle Poland's piracy industry.
"The piracy problem on the cable TV market is huge," said Ryszard Wojtaszek, vice president of the National Chamber of Cable Communication. "We need to act together. All companies, including copyright holders, which lose out because of problems with piracy, should unite and fight it."
So far this hasn't happened, though, since large pay TV stations and cable operators do not typically bring charges against pirates. "And as long as large stations do nothing, others will do the same," said Andrzej Tomaszek, a partner at Drzewiecki, Tomaszek & Wspolnicy law firm, which is representing HBO in the case.
In 1996, Canal+ Polska, a subsidiary of the French pay TV station, upgraded the quality of its filters after learning how easy they were to duplicate and mass produce. Before it did this, however, the station never reported any cases of piracy to the police. "We did have evidence, we saw the counterfeit filters but as far as I know we didn't report anything to the police," said Paulina Krasinska, PR specialist at Canal+ Polska.
HBO, according to Tomaszek, acted like any other signal broadcaster would in other parts of the world. "HBO's managers assumed that we are living in a state of law," he said. "And in my opinion there are good reasons to believe that they (distributors of counterfeit filters) will be punished. The police has evidence and as far as I know they pleaded guilty."
A filter allows a coded signal to be received by a subscriber. According to Jarek Kielnel, director of the technology department at HBO, the filters currently used by HBO are sophisticated and almost impossible to counterfeit. "Unlike the old ones that used to be manufactured illegally on a mass scale, the current technology cannot be copied by individuals or even some electronics companies," he said.
"We have changed our security equipment every year for the last three years," Roter said.
According to Kielnel, the filters' technology is the same as that used to make computer microprocessors and can only be produced in a few places around the world. "We don't believe that there's been a broad distribution of any of these filters," Roter said. "We don't believe the manufacturing was done in Poland. We know that there were some leftover materials from one of the production runs outside Poland and those leftover materials were used to make a small quantity of filters for illegal distribution." Roter doesn't think that there are more of these kinds of devices on the black market. "Since our action there's been no activity at the market," he said.
But if this kind of piracy does happen on a larger scale, the cost to change the filters would be serious. "Exchanging the filters for a large cable network such as Aster City (the cable TV network owned by the Elektrim group), which distributes HBO, would costs hundreds of thousands of dollars," Kielnel said. HBO's filters are imported for about $10 each.
But according to Roter, upgrading the technology is always only a short-term strategy. "People are creative and they will try regardless of the technology used," he said. "For us it's a matter of staying one step ahead (of the pirates)."
Pirates inevitably keep adapting to changing technologies, no matter how fast operators make their equipment counterfeit resistant.
"We've been told about cases of pirating the cards for digital terminals," said Canal+' Krasinska. Canal+ Polska runs one of Poland's two digital platforms, Cyfra+. "Such cards can be used to decode the digital signal, but our legal department is taking care of it."
But market insiders said digital cards are even easier to copy than filters. All someone has to do to manufacture counterfeit cards is write a computer program to decode the encrypted access code and then use it with integrated circuits that can be purchased in any electronics store in Poland. "You can even manufacture such cards on a mass scale at home, once the access code is broken," sources said.
Upgrading the technology of filters and cards is not the only way operators can fight piracy. "Another way is to create laws, build awareness and prosecute people who break the law," Roter said.
But adequate legislation is still in its infancy in Poland. The latest telecom act, which was accepted by the Sejm in May and is now in the Senate, addresses piracy and is part of a package of laws that will help prepare Poland for European Union accession.
"Under the current law, piracy is not addressed directly," Tomaszek said. "In order to prosecute pirates we tend to base charges above all on the copyright law." According to Tomaszek, it's not only lawyers who are pushing for proper legislation. "The police needs clear and direct regulations they can refer to when prosecuting pirates," he said. "The act of stealing a signal has to be addressed in the law, so I have a lot of hope for the new law waiting in Parliament."
