gunsmoke2
April 30th, 2002, 07:15 PM
Posted: 30 Apr 2002 12:07 Post subject: Police cannot seize TV dishes, court rules
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Police cannot seize TV dishes, court rules
Grey-market satellites
Ian Jack
National Post
OTTAWA - An Ontario court has granted an injunction blocking police from seizing satellite dishes or shutting down distributors pending a constitutional challenge to a law that prevents Canadians from watching television from foreign satellites.
Lawyers for so-called grey-market satellite companies are seeking a similar ruling in Quebec. The Ontario injunction stops any police action until May 7, when the lawyers will bid for a longer injunction lasting until their constitutional challenge is heard.
"It is an interim injunction and it simply maintains the status quo," said Alan Gold, lawyer for a coalition of 17 small satellite companies. Police have not been laying charges while they waited for the outcome of a previous court battle that ended on Friday.
The Supreme Court ruled it is illegal to receive foreign satellite signals, after lower courts in three provinces had said there was nothing in federal law that prevented people from doing so. Estimates of the numbers of Canadians with these satellite dishes run to the hundreds of thousands. Major media companies lined up with the government to try to shut them down. ExpressVu, owned by BCE Inc., and StarChoice, controlled by the Shaw family of Calgary, are the only licensed Canadian distributors of satellite television.
"The legislation has been in limbo for two years or longer pending the Supreme Court decision, so what's the harm of waiting a few more months until the Charter issues can be disposed of?" Mr. Gold said from Toronto. The constitutional challenge claims Canadians' rights to freedom of expression are violated when the government refuses to allow them to watch television beamed into the country by U.S. or other foreign satellite providers.
Judge James Carnwath of Ontario Superior Court granted the interim injunction after a two-part hearing and despite the opposition of the Crown, Mr. Gold said.
The unanimous Supreme Court decision said only ExpressVu and StarChoice are authorized to sell the decoding equipment needed to receive satellite signals. It came after battles before lower courts in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec, all of them won by the small satellite companies.
They were dubbed grey-market providers because the legality of their businesses has always been in question. They sell services that involve hacking into U.S. or other satellite signals, or in some cases offer subscriptions to U.S. services such as DirecTV. Since that company will only sell to U.S. residents, Canadian companies provide U.S. postal addresses to Canadian customers.
The government says it must prevent foreign signals in order to continue the longstanding practice of letting Canadian private companies profit from rebroadcasts of popular U.S. programs on the condition that they fund some domestic production out of the profits. The media companies are worried about losing their monopolies, but also about the issue of maintaining copyright within national boundaries.
The case is the television equivalent of Napster, the file-sharing software that bedevilled the music industry by offering for free product it spent millions developing. The music industry was eventually able to bring Napster to heel through court rulings that have forced it to become a fee-charging company that remits copyright fees to the companies.
The small satellite companies say the issue is freedom of choice and expression, and some multicultural groups say the only way to watch homeland programming is through satellite dishes.
Media companies said on Friday the government must step up its enforcement efforts and compared watching foreign television signals to tapping illegally into hydro lines or stealing books from bookstores. The injunction will put off that action for at least a week, although there is little enthusiasm among law enforcement officials to actively pursue cases in any event
GS2
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Police cannot seize TV dishes, court rules
Grey-market satellites
Ian Jack
National Post
OTTAWA - An Ontario court has granted an injunction blocking police from seizing satellite dishes or shutting down distributors pending a constitutional challenge to a law that prevents Canadians from watching television from foreign satellites.
Lawyers for so-called grey-market satellite companies are seeking a similar ruling in Quebec. The Ontario injunction stops any police action until May 7, when the lawyers will bid for a longer injunction lasting until their constitutional challenge is heard.
"It is an interim injunction and it simply maintains the status quo," said Alan Gold, lawyer for a coalition of 17 small satellite companies. Police have not been laying charges while they waited for the outcome of a previous court battle that ended on Friday.
The Supreme Court ruled it is illegal to receive foreign satellite signals, after lower courts in three provinces had said there was nothing in federal law that prevented people from doing so. Estimates of the numbers of Canadians with these satellite dishes run to the hundreds of thousands. Major media companies lined up with the government to try to shut them down. ExpressVu, owned by BCE Inc., and StarChoice, controlled by the Shaw family of Calgary, are the only licensed Canadian distributors of satellite television.
"The legislation has been in limbo for two years or longer pending the Supreme Court decision, so what's the harm of waiting a few more months until the Charter issues can be disposed of?" Mr. Gold said from Toronto. The constitutional challenge claims Canadians' rights to freedom of expression are violated when the government refuses to allow them to watch television beamed into the country by U.S. or other foreign satellite providers.
Judge James Carnwath of Ontario Superior Court granted the interim injunction after a two-part hearing and despite the opposition of the Crown, Mr. Gold said.
The unanimous Supreme Court decision said only ExpressVu and StarChoice are authorized to sell the decoding equipment needed to receive satellite signals. It came after battles before lower courts in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec, all of them won by the small satellite companies.
They were dubbed grey-market providers because the legality of their businesses has always been in question. They sell services that involve hacking into U.S. or other satellite signals, or in some cases offer subscriptions to U.S. services such as DirecTV. Since that company will only sell to U.S. residents, Canadian companies provide U.S. postal addresses to Canadian customers.
The government says it must prevent foreign signals in order to continue the longstanding practice of letting Canadian private companies profit from rebroadcasts of popular U.S. programs on the condition that they fund some domestic production out of the profits. The media companies are worried about losing their monopolies, but also about the issue of maintaining copyright within national boundaries.
The case is the television equivalent of Napster, the file-sharing software that bedevilled the music industry by offering for free product it spent millions developing. The music industry was eventually able to bring Napster to heel through court rulings that have forced it to become a fee-charging company that remits copyright fees to the companies.
The small satellite companies say the issue is freedom of choice and expression, and some multicultural groups say the only way to watch homeland programming is through satellite dishes.
Media companies said on Friday the government must step up its enforcement efforts and compared watching foreign television signals to tapping illegally into hydro lines or stealing books from bookstores. The injunction will put off that action for at least a week, although there is little enthusiasm among law enforcement officials to actively pursue cases in any event
GS2