The United Kingdom begins to apply severe prison sentences to those who sell pirated subscriptions to IPTV services.
Internet Protocol TV (IPTV), namely Internet Protocol Televisionis a way to receive television content through your contracted bandwidth, and with a different method than that used by conventional streaming platforms such as Netflix.
It has a series of advantages and disadvantages as we have explained in our article on IPTV, but the truth is that you are going to need a kind of decoder to be able to receive the content, something that is also not exempt from piracy.
There is business illegal by which these pirated decoders are sold so that certain people, in exchange for a low economic amount, can access this television offer without paying its original managers.
But as usual with any other type of piracy, all those actors who are taking advantage of intellectual property through some pirate decoder that they may end up selling to third parties, can even face prison sentences, as has just happened recently in the United Kingdom. where two people have been sentenced to 45 months in prison for defrauding both Sky and BT Sport.
And it is that unfortunately the illegal subscriptions are the order of the day, an underground business against which many operators are fighting to recover part of their lost profits, and now a sentence in the United Kingdom has sentenced two men to serve a total of 45 months in prison given that they defrauded more than €600,000 in a short period of only 18 months.
Both men were arrested in 2019, but have not been sentenced until the last few days, where both admitted to selling illegal devices and subscriptions that allowed customers to access television shows, movies and live sporting events in violation of copyright.
45 months for defrauding more than 600,000 euros
Apparently they put their ads on Facebook, and the interested parties paid them by PayPal, defrauding more than €600,000 in those 18 months mentioned.
Although both defendants asked the court for leniency, the judge Rupert Lowe considered that the crime had been too serious to avoid prison sentences.
So he sentenced one of them to 24 months in prison and another to 21 months in prison, the aforementioned 45 months of punishment “for fraudulent trading, money laundering and copyright infringement crime”.
“Intellectual property crimes harm the economy. It affects creators, evading taxes and hindering innovation. We will investigate and take appropriate action to ensure that there is a fair and legal business environment”, says Clive Phillips, KCCTS Operations Manager.
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism