We are the solicitors acting in Canada for the U.S Satellite Broadcasting (USSB), a U.S. corporation headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota.
USSB offers a package of direct-to-home programming services delivered via satellite to subscribers using DSS equipment in the United States.
Pursuant to its contracts with program suppliers, USSB has only acquired the right to distribute its service in the United States.
To explain further, satellite programming service providers such as Showtime and HBO hold, directly or by license, copyright in their programs. These rights to use programs can me licensed in different ws and for different territories, for example U.S. rights for television, Canadian rights for pay-TV, world rights for merchandise related to the characters in the programs.
In the case of USSB, it has obtained from its program suppliers only the rights for direct broadcast satellite distribution in the United States. For their part, Canadian companies may have paid to obtain the rights to those same programs to distribute them in various ways in Canada.
The Canadian government has advised dealers and consumers that:
"American DTH service providers do not have the lawful right in Canada to authorize the decoding of their programming.
Retailers who distribute "grey market" programming are aiding and abetting consumers to decode DTH signals that are not authorized for distribution in Canada and thereby putting themselves at legal risk.
Dealers should know that it is illegal to import, manufacture or sell equipment used to decode signals provided by someone other than the lawful distributor."
As the holiday season approaches, USSB is concerned that some Canadian dealers may be selling DSS equipment to subscribers and assisting them to receive USSB service, or otherwise advertising that USSB service is available and can be lawfully received in Canada. Any such offer made by a dealer is not authorized by USSB. Individuals involved in these efforts are purposely misleading Canadian residents by indicating that they can receive USSB programming in Canada. Not only is this untrue, but it encourages these Canadian residents to purchase DSS units which may be of no use to them.
This has been clearly noted by the Canadian government in the same consumer Alert: "The equipment used to illegally decode U.S. signals is expensive--yet it comes with no guarantee that it can do the job, or can continue to do the job, for which it was purchased."
If your company has been assisting in the sale of USSB service to subscribers in Canada or using the USSB or DSS names, trademarks or logos in any form, you are hereby required to cease such activity immediately.
Where USSB establishes and confirms that a Canadian subscriber is receiving its service at a Canadian address, USSB will terminate the service.
Your truly,
Borden & Elliot
What's all this fuss about DSS reception in Canada. Don't they have television and/ or CATV way up there?
Canada certainly does have TV and CATV. Something like half of all households in Canada have cable. There are also a couple of fledgling DTH companies (StarChoice and ExpressVu) providing service to Canada.
Gee, Canada sounds a lot like the old USSR, where what you are able to watch on television was also dictated by the bureaucrats.
The situation is a bit more complicated than that. The following may sound to some like a justification of or support for the current Canadian policy, but please read through to the end and keep in mind that I support the current Canadian policy only to a limited extent. For reference, I have lived in both the US and Canada, I am a dual citizen of both countries, and in my own ideal world I would be able to watch whatever I wanted from sources in both countries.
Canada has a lot of =good= talent in the media industry. Canada is also, however, right next door to the US, a country with nine times its population and with a booming TV/movie industry of its own that, left to itself, could easily overwhelm the Canadian industry by its sheer size.
Canadians already get a lot of exposure to the US media. All the major US TV broadcast networks, and several US cable stations, can be had on most Canadian cable TV systems. The US/Canadian border has sometimes been called the world's longest one-way mirror, Canadians see both sides, whereas most Americans know almost nothing about what happens in Canada.
Concern in Canada that the Canadian media industry could be suffocated by its American cousin has led to various kinds of cultural protection- ism. For example, Canadian radio stations are required to include a certain minimum percentage of "Canadian content" (songs sung by Canadian artists and produced by Canadian companies). And although cable TV systems in Canada do include quite a few US stations, there are strict limits on how many US vs. Canadian stations can be carried, and preference is given in many cases to Canadian cable channels over similar US cable channels. As for DTH satellite TV, the US-based systems are not licensed to provide service to Canada at all.
BTW, this protectionism works both ways. Many good Canadian shows can't be had in the US (unless someone happens to be lucky enough to have a Canadian relative or friend who is willing to tape stuff and mail it south). And just as Canadian residents can't (legally) subscribe to DirecTV or DiSH because the Canadian CRTC won't permit it, US residents can't (legally) subscribe to StarChoice or ExpressVu because the FCC won't allow it. (The US policy is a tit-for-tat response to the Canadian protectionism, to be sure, but in my opinion it really isn't a fair exchange because US policy makers can't or won't understand Canada's worries about its domestic media, and the US media industry really doesn't care about the Canadian industry and would just as soon swallow it up whole if they could.)
While these policies have helped preserve the Canadian media industry from being squashed by its US counterpart, in my opinion they are back- firing and need to be modified. The biggest problem I see is that the protectionist policies are souring Canadians to their own culture, leading many Canadians to think the home-grown stuff is inferior and not worth wasting their time on. Witness, for example, the hundreds of thousands of Canadians who have bought US DTH systems on the grey market, using phony US addresses. Even though the Canadian DTH systems are trying to lure these people over with special deals, many aren't doing it. Ironically, in my view, the Canadian government's efforts, however well-intentioned, are threatening the very industry they're trying so hard to preserve.
Neither government is likely to budge on this issue without something which they perceive as a concession from the other. My suggestion would be to have DTV and DiSH agree to carry Canadian broadcast and cable networks on their systems in the US, in return for the Canadian government's allowing StarChoice and ExpressVu to carry most US networks on their systems. And until there are enough Canadian-operated satellites in orbit to provide room for all that US programming, Can- ada should let Canadians subscribe legally to US satellite systems, under some sort of arrangement that would ensure that a fair share of the revenue makes it back to Canadian media concerns.
The US would see this sort of arrangement as "only fair". The advantage to Canada is that more Canadians would be willing to buy in to local DTH systems if they had ample material from both Canada and the US; Canadian stations would not risk losing audiences who defected to grey-market DTH from the States; and Canadian stations would gain at least a modest additional audience from interested viewers in the US.
One major roadblock in the way of this kind of idea, of course, is that much of the affected programming is subject to restrictive licensing. For example, the same movies are licensed to HBO (for the US market) and to TMN (for the Canadian market), and these contracts would be violated big time if HBO were to start being beamed to Canada, or if TMN were to be legally available in the US. Also, many individual shows on Canadian broadcast networks are of US origin, and the US networks with the US rights to those shows would probably complain if US residents could watch them on Canadian stations. But hopefully these kinds of problems can be ironed out if people really want to do so, especially given the prospect of even bigger markets for everyone, and also given the risk of having many good Canadian programs disappear altogether if the current state of affairs continue.