Brussels, 17 December 2001

PRESS RELEASE

In the Board of Directors held in Brussels on the 17th December 2001, AEPOC (European Association for the Protection of Encrypted works and services) submitted to the European Commission (Media Unit of the DG Market) its own position paper concerning the status of implementation of the Directive 98/84/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 November 1998 about legal protection of services based on, or consisting of, conditional access.

AEPOC points out the major point of weakness of the directive. Inter alia, first of all, we consider the need for punishing the personal use and possession of illegal decoding devices across all the Europe and we recognise the necessity to introduce a minimum threshold of the sanctions. Secondly, we have thought it appropriate to concentrate our attention on the concept of "illicit device", which need to be better defined.

We estimate that the illegal turnover connected to piracy is in order of 1 billion Euros yearly. This sum does not represent simply an economical loss to service operators and to individual countries (because the tax evasion), but stifles creativity, innovation, research and diminishes investment and working opportunities; in other words, it slows down technological progress by producing a distortion of the whole audiovisual sector and by affecting the market price. It also has very detrimental effects with regard to the honest subscribers to pay-tv services who have to pay an higher price due to the parasitic viewers.

In the 2002 Action Plan, AEPOC pledges itself to promote the full implementation and the massive enforcement of this Directive, to strengthen the connection with the Public Prosecutors, to dedicate particular attention to issues connected to the information society services and the cable transmission, to encourage the Commission's proposed measures to fight cyber crime. Furthermore, we encourage the establishment of a new specialized anti-piracy department, within the Europol.
A particular attention will be devoted to the problem of signal theft into the so called "Accession Countries".

The next AEPOC meeting will be held in London during the month of February.