Colombia. The work being done on piracy sometimes seems insufficient, but that does not mean that we must give up on this hard battle against illegality. At the moment you can receive an economic benefit for distributing equipment, selling signals without a license and countless other practices considered criminal, which fortunately contemplate in Colombia drastic penalties for violators.
Private enterprise, in an effort to strengthen its activities, has created an organization that is dedicated to combating from all fronts a particular form of this scourge. The Alliance Against Pay-TV Piracy (the "Alliance") is made up of a group of content providers, Pay-TV operators and technology distributors who came together to combat in Latin America a form of piracy known in the industry as FTA (Free to Air) piracy.
This crime consists of the sale and distribution of satellite signal receivers that are initially intended to receive free signals, which undergo an alteration to decipher, illegally and without authorization, the pay television signals. This is not something new, but despite this, the lack of pronouncements by regulatory and control bodies, the legal gaps in import rules and the "liveliness" of some opportunists, are the perfect mix to profit from these practices without major consequences.
Fortunately, the results are already seen by issuing technical concepts that define what an FTA receiver should look like. In Colombia, the company Siditel S.A., recognized in the medium of cable television and community television service, joins this cause and, at the head of its Manager, Gabriel Puerta Restrepo, who organized the forum "Prevention and Control of Piracy", an event that brought together 22 television systems, between community and private operators from the Antioquia region to discuss the issue with the help of speakers Oscar Amaya on behalf of La Alianza, Engineer Edilberto Ramírez, head of anti-piracy of DirecTV and John Acosta Bernal, of surveillance control and monitoring of the ANTV.
The conclusion reached was that when purchasing and using receivers and/or decoders, the following considerations should be taken into account:
Gabriel Puerta: The first thing to know is how a legal subscription television system works, a service regulated by the State, in which it is required to have the license of the National Television Authority, ANTV. And second, you must have the permissions for the retransmission that must be granted by the programmers, who are the owners of the copyright of the contents and therefore decide if the signal is free or if, for its commercial exploitation, it is encoded through a Conditioned Access System called CAS.
According to the last concept we must ask ourselves What is CAS? It is a Conditioned Access System that allows encrypting and decrypting a satellite, cable and / or OTT television signal by means of software and / or hardware, for the purpose of limiting the service, so that it can only be enjoyed by those users who sign a contract with the operators of the subscription television service.
The integrality of the system ranges from the header equipment to the decoders (or smartphones or / tablets in the case of OTT), which means that the companies that own the CAS authorize the use of their system in decoder equipment of the different manufacturers. However, to understand the technical considerations of a team to capture satellite television signals illegally, it is necessary to differentiate from the technical the types of signals that are transmitted in a satellite television system, are incidental / free and / or encrypted (encrypted and encrypted).
The nature of these two signals defines the types of equipment required for tuning them. When it comes to incidental/free signals, receivers that do not require CAS (Conditioned Access System) can be used because the signals are transmitted without any protection. On the contrary, for the case of encoded signals, decoder equipment containing CAS is required.
Luis Pinto: What about FTA (Free To Air) equipment, why can they be illegal?
Gabriel Puerta: These devices were originally designed to capture Incidental/free signals, but unscrupulous people saw the opportunity to condition the CAS (Conditioned Access System), so that some of these FTA equipment illegally have decoder capacity that allows tuning the satellite, downloading the contents of some subscription TV operators and decrypting them. It should be noted that the techniques of extraction of the keys are in themselves a violation of the economic rights of author and related.
In Colombia there is a regulation that prohibits the capture and retransmission of encoded signals through FTA equipment with decoder capacity, behaviors sanctioned in the criminal code, both in what has to do with the reception and retransmission of these signals, configuring the crime of violation of the economic rights of author and related (Art. 271 Criminal Code), as in what has to do with the import and commercialization of FTA equipment with decoder capacity, typifying the crime of violation of the mechanisms of protection of copyright and related rights (Art. 272 Criminal Code), both with penalties of four (4) to eight (8) years in prison and a fine of 26.66 to 1000 legal minimum monthly wages.
Luis Pinto.: What can we conclude?
Gabriel Puerta: When purchasing FTA receivers it should be taken into account that they do not contain SLOTS or slots to insert smart cards (Smart Card) since these are not required to receive free signals, therefore this smart card slot is a deterrent to show a false legality of the equipment.
Likewise, the equipment must not contain any CAS that is used to open the encoded signals and any software that circumvents the CAS. The intention of Siditel S.A, as a company active in the subscription television market, is to raise awareness of good practices in the market and prevent actions that violate copyright and related economic rights, and the non-distribution, sale or use of equipment with the capacity to violate the mechanisms of protection of copyright by our customers.
I believe that the measures have been effective, there are already people prosecuted for this type of crime, it has already been clearly determined what are the characteristics of the legal recipients with full knowledge and participation of the DIAN, the ANTV and the Prosecutor's Office, which give part of victory and continue their work with the support of private enterprise.
Text written for TVyVideo+Radio by engineer Luis Pinto.
