When it comes to prosecuting pirated IPTV, different anti-piracy agencies are equally faced with large organizations as well as individuals who start by modifying decos and end up with a network of resellers made up of hundreds of members.
This has been the case of one of the largest operations registered in the Netherlands, which ended with a ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union that will establish jurisprudence on the way of understanding pirated IPTV.
They sold modified decos
The ringleader of this pirated IPTV business is Jack Frederik Wullums, who sold decoders, some of them through his Filmspeler site. In these decos he pre-installed Kodi and a selection of add-ons on the devices that allowed customers to access pirated copies of movies, TV shows, and live TV. Although Wullums had no control over what those plugins did, the Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN insisted that his actions were illegal.
The case made it all the way to the Court of Justice of the European Union, which eventually revealed another interesting feature of copyright law: its ability to accommodate situations that were never imagined at the time, and then close all perceived loopholes. The CJEU said that since copyright holders have exclusive rights to authorize “communication to the public”, that right was breached when Wullems knowingly modified his ‘Filmspeler’ devices to allow direct access to illegal copies of works. with copyright, being also a for-profit activity.
This legal loophole has to do with the surprise that pirated streaming gave to torrent file sharing as the main form of piracy. In the latter, most people understood the risks associated with uploading copyrighted content, especially since the word “distribution” is clearly defined in the law. But with pirated IPTV, there is no significant upload and, more importantly, no copies of movies or TV shows on users’ machines. So if that wasn’t illegal, how could it be illegal to sell someone a piracy-configured set-top box to consume content in a way that doesn’t violate the law?
370 pirate IPTV vendors fall
The Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN has followed the actions generated since the modification of Wullums Filmspeler decoders and, since 2017, 370 pirated IPTV vendors/providers associated with these modified decoders have already fallen.
The sanctions for these range from the 25,000 euros with which he fined a Dutchman living in the Dominican Republic, to smaller fines for a small online merchant who paid 500 euros and accepted another 1,000 euros per day for recidivism, or a fine of 500 euros for each hyperlink to infringing content offered to the public.
“BREIN isn’t just limited to the big guns, even little fish who think they’re taking a piece of the pie don’t shy away from danger,” says BREIN Director Tim Kuik.
