Community Announcement You Have Been Warned! Say NO to Illegal content!

By- Kashif Amjad

Some recent events have changed recently with regards to purchasing and using Indian Channel IPTV boxes not using officially licensed content. Firstly in late June 2014 there was a raid of a premise in Hyderabad India, where an illegal streaming centre was found by Cyber Crime wing of the Hyderabad Police. During the arrest According to Mahendar Reddy, the Police Commissioner of Hyderabad, Jadoo TV, a US based company, has been illegally selling set-top boxes in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia since 2009.

“This matter is of paramount importance as it has been creating a yearly loss of about Rs 6,000 crore to the film and television industry. This raid should serve as a warning for any other illegal transmission rackets and should also be an alert to any consumers who use such connections for their televisions,”Reddy said.

The way I explain this to people in plain English by purchasing an illegal IPTV transmission box it’s no different to walking into a cinema with a video camera
Meta data laws are changing and you can be found by internet service providers. The Hollywood movie houses recently decided to do exactly what I am alluding to above, and whole heap of people in Australia (4,726 in fact) who illegally downloaded pirate torrents of the movie Dallas Buyers Club, whereby the owners of the film are not only taking legal action against the internet service provider who were forced under court action to provide the end user details but against the individual consumers of that service provider.

Those 4,726 people now have received a nasty letter from the lawyers of Dallas Buyers Club. The letter opens with a description of piracy and explains how it has had an adverse effect on the film’s copyright owner (DBC) and licensee (Voltage).Pirates are then given the option to reach a settlement with DBC and Voltage or face them in the Federal Court of Australia.

Recipients will have 28 days to respond to the letter or they will face further legal action by the studio. Heavy stuff! So if you think it can’t happen to you, there are 4,726 people you may wish to talk to you who have received the letter above.

I contacted the Federal Minister for CommunicationsMalcolm Turnbull and he made this comment for the sub-continent community of Australia
“The Australian government has done a lot to tackle piracy online including passing a new law to speed up the removal of the worse infringing sites and supporting an industry code that will notify people when they are illegally downloading content.

Of course a big factor is the affordability and availability of content. Part of the solution is making content in Australia available at the same time, or very shortly after, it is released overseas at a comparable price. This applies as much to content made in Bollywood as that made in Hollywood.”

I contacted the Department of Communications (www.communications.gov.au) after the Dallas Buyers Club case and asked in reference to illegal streaming IPTV boxes sold and consumed in Australia. They have indicated there have been recent changes to the law where there may also be scope for proceedings under the Copyright Act against Australian manufacturers, distributors, retailers and users of these IPTV boxes.

Criminal proceedings may be brought under section 132AC of the Act where it can be demonstrated that the conduct of a person results in copyright infringement that has a substantial prejudicial impact on the copyright owner and occurs on a commercial scale. It is also open to copyright owners to consider pursuing civil action against an infringing party under the Copyright Act.

There are several media campaigns run by the industry itself to offer more awareness to consumers such as the IP Awareness (www.ipawareness.com.au) campaigns and if the Indian sub-continent community was not included before, it is now.

A new campaign video was taken during the filming of Brett Lee’s cinematic debut film UnIndian (www.unindianfilm.com) by passionate piracy advocate and director/producer of the filmAnupam Sharma was shot in Sydney during the filming of the movie. The campaign is called Play Your Part thanking people who do the right thing. 47,000 Australians depend on the film and television industries for their livelihoods.
(Kashif Amjad is the CEO of Slimtel Pty Ltd.)