01-27-1992 Council Packet - Laserfiche WebLink

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Continental Sleuthing Traps Eight By LINDA HAUGSTED ontinental Cablevision Corp. executives in St I Paul, Minn., hope to win convictions next month after a new method of detecting cable signal pi- rales through electronic sleuthing resulted in the arrest of eight people. District manager Randall Coleman said a task force at the system has developed an anti-piracy program that can be executed over any addressable system. The system, which serves approximately 55,000 sub scribers, be^an the program early in November, and hopes *o prosecute the alleged pirates at trials sched ule for early January. Coleman said he believes the St. Paul system ’s ver sion of the **electronic bullet” is unique. Computer al gorithms —programs that instruct altered chips in set tops to malfunction, shutting down the box — were used during a much-publicized anti-piracy effort in a Time Warner Inc. system in Queens, N.Y., this year in which aboiu 300 people where charged with having illegal cable converters (Multichannel News, April 25, page 1). But the St. Paul campaign has not totally disabled the box. Colenum said there have been four different ways of certifying signal pirates in his program, l ie refused to discuss them for fear of tipping off convert er pirates. Coleman, however, offer^ to share the de tails of the anti-piracy efforts with other systems in the state. Accounts of Uk' campaign printed in St. Paul news- P'^rera, however. sai«.' the system has developed a way lo cut off basic service tk- customers suspected of steal ing premium charmels. IIcustomer continues to pay his bill, the system is assure d that signal is being ob tained illegally. A second method is to send a message, receivable only to altered boxes. If a subscriber responds to the message, the operator’s claim of signal theft is vali dated. So far, the system has been 100 percent accu rate, Coleman asserted. Coleman said he believes that piracy in his market is no more than the national averai'C (4 to 6 percent, according to National Cable Television Association estimates). The system initiated the campaign only after pro ducing spots featuring the state’s attorney general and wrestler Jesse “The Body ” Ventura, warning con sumers that stealing signal is a crime. Then it launched its electronic countermeasures. Coleman said the system has other suspected pirates in its “electronic holding pen” who will be prosecuted once the firs' eight cases are successfully concluded. Under state law, pirates will be charged with theft of service and can face a $1,300 fine. Jodi Hooper, assistant director. NCTA office of ca ble signal theft, said it appears Continental of St. Paul’s campaign is unique in its implementation of electronic countermeasures. Other systems have used a variation of the bogus message campaign, advertising a non-existent PPV event to suspected pirates, getting law-breakers to identify themselves by calling in to order. She added that technical efforts to catch pirates appear to be gain ing popularity, but many systems still do day-to-day checking to catch illegal taps through conventional means. That opinion is backed up by a Ryan-McGinn-Sam- ples Research Inc. survey of 405 operators conducted this summer. The survey showed that the majority of] respondents rely on system audits on a regular basis[ to detect thefts, or on amnesty programs designed u solicit anonymous tips. In that same survey, 71 perceni of the operators expected to lose less than $50,000 to] signal theft this year. ■