E sccr/21/2 Original: English date: August , 2010 Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights Twenty First Session Geneva, November to 12, 2010

Cases Illustrating the Impact of Unauthorized Use or Retransmission

219 Increasingly, television is a global industry with programming that moves across national borders. Television profits are a function of the total revenues of the whole industry—advertising sales, annual volume of advertising, network and station television billing, subscriber numbers and rates, market ratings, syndication fees, and other indicators.⁷⁴

220 In the meantime, the convergence of information and communication technologies has widened opportunities and possibilities for unauthorized use of broadcasts. Neighboring rights holders invest in extensive technical, organizational, and financial undertakings for their broadcast/cablecast activities. The operation of broadcasting/cablecasting organizations is a costly organizational, logistical, and technical undertaking as daily program output needs to be planned, acquired, and produced. Some of these operate markets with limited geographic boundaries and others operate internationally and globally.

221 As shown previously, some unauthorized use of signals can limit broadcasters' and cablecasters’ abilities to negotiate and receive economic compensation for the use of their signals. This results in the loss of their ability to protect the quality of their products and the devaluation of their investment. For example, unauthorized use of a broadcast for which the broadcaster may have paid a large sum to ensure exclusivity or priority of content (e.g., a sports event) means that the investment will be largely devalued if the broadcaster has no means to prevent its misappropriation within the market for which it has acquired rights.

222 The pay TV industry is experiencing significant challenges of unauthorized reception and retransmission. Although there is mounting pressure from the industry in Asia and elsewhere to respect intellectual property rights, the scale of these unauthorized uses remains large. Many national governments, regional regulatory offices, indigenous industry, and international content providers agree that the problem is large and growing and that there is a need to address the problem urgently as seen in recent Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) discussions and agreements.

223 Particularly troubling to the industry are commercial retransmission operators that obtain free and consumer paid satellite transmissions without payment and (simultaneously) retransmit them for a fee, often to commercial enterprises such as bars, pubs, or similar venues that display the retransmitted signal for their own commercial purposes.⁷⁵ These uses undermine the operations of legitimate pay television broadcasters that purchase licenses and spend sizeable investments in the production and marketing of licensed content in the licensed territory.