General Information

AEPOC is the European Association for the Protection of Encrypted Works and Services (Association Européenne pour la Protection des Œuvres et services Cryptés). Its members include 31 of the major players in the European digital television and telecommunications sector. In particular, AEPOC brings together and represents operators in 4 entrepreneurial sectors: Television Channels, Suppliers of Conditional Access Technology, Supplies of Transmission Infrastructures and Producers of Hardware.

The basic value underlying the Association's activities is the conviction that it is only by promoting information, communication and co-ordination between companies involved as well as between them and the institutional bodies on the national and international levels that it will be possible to deal synergically with an increasingly threatening phenomenon: piracy of audiovisual services to the detriment of conditional access services. To this end the activities of its members include:

• constant monitoring of the situations involved;
• careful analysis of European legislation and the international agreements covering the safeguarding and protection of conditional access services, the audiovisual market and telecommunications in general, and the degree to which Community Directives are applied within individual Member Countries;
• the identification of weak points in the existing regulations;
• the promotion of new laws to cope with the ongoing changes in the market and the problems involved in its protection.

The Association's research is aimed at developing adequate and increasingly effective instruments to deal more incisively with piracy. The involvement of members and other players in the audiovisual industry is essential this objective is to be achieved.

It is of the greatest importance that the production and distribution sectors, which have traditionally acted separately and along different lines, should find a common working platform in AEPOC to tackle a phenomenon (the illegal decoding of conditional access transmissions) which is extremely damaging to the whole audiovisual sector.