A finding by the Cape division of the High Court in favour of a broadcasting legislation loophole might allow DSTV viewers to get away with piracy.
The Independent Group of newspapers reports that the High Court found MultiChoice had effectively been broadcasting unlawfully until last month. The court also agreed with lawyers who argued that a legal loophole existed that could give pirate MultiChoice viewers immunity from prosecution.
The case is reported to highlight the legal ambiguities in broadcasting laws, which have been chopped and changed over the years. It also highlights the problems of piracy and the ease with which a DSTV smart card, the card with an embedded microchip that is used for activating the decoder, may be copied.
The case centres on a man who was originally convicted by a magistrate of using an unlicensed card to watch the DSTV channels in 2001. However, his conviction was overturned by the Superior Court, even though he admitted that he owned the equipment with the intent to receive the TV channels.
Cape Town lawyers argued that MultiChoice had only received its licence in terms of the Independent Broadcasting Act (IBA) a month ago, despite having originally applied for the licence in 1998 under the old Broadcasting Act. They argued that if the Act had intended for established broadcasters to continue broadcasting as if they had a licence, then it would have stated this, and that the IBA makes no provision for the prosecution of pirate viewers in the case of MultiChoice. The Cape High Court agreed with the arguments.
MultiChoice`s smart card vulnerability to being copied, while not a direct issue in the case, was also highlighted.
ITWeb spoke to a pirate viewer who says instructions on how to copy the cards are freely available on the Internet and so is the software that can be used.
"The MultiChoice cards do not have the secure private encryption of many other cards and a commercial reader/writer that has been loaded with the correct software can do it," he says.
A would-be pirate viewer would reportedly first buy a second-hand decoder, then find someone with a legal MultiChoice card and copy it, allowing the monthly subscription fee to be bypassed.
"As long as the original card is active, then the copies will continue to receive the signal," he says.
At the time of publishing, MultiChoice had not responded to queries from ITWeb. However, a corporate spokesman told newspapers that the company is studying the judgment.
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