Pirate decryption is the decryption, or decoding, of pay TV or pay radio signals without permission from the original broadcaster. The term "pirate" is used in the sense of copyright infringement. The MPA and other groups which lobby in favour of intellectual property (specifically copyright and trademark) regulations have labelled such decryption as "signal theft" and object to it, arguing that losing out on a potential chance to profit from a consumer's subscription fees counts as a loss of actual profit.
History The concept of pay TV or pay television involves a broadcaster deliberately transmitting signals in a non-standard, scrambled or encrypted format in order to charge viewers a subscription fee for the use of a special decoder needed to receive the scrambled broadcast signal. Early pay TV broadcasts in countries such as the United States used standard over-the-air transmitters; many restrictions applied as anti-siphoning laws were enacted to prevent broadcasters of scrambled signals from engaging in activities to harm the development of standard free-to-air commercial broadcasting. Scrambled signals were limited to large communities which already had a certain minimum number of unencrypted broadcast stations, relegated to certain frequencies. Restrictions were placed on access of pay TV broadcasters to content such as recent feature films in order to give free TV broadcasters a chance to air these programs before they were siphoned away by pay channels. Under these conditions, the pay TV concept was very slow to become commercially viable; most television and radio broadcasts remained in-the-clear and were funded by commercial advertising, individual and corporate donations to educational broadcasters, direct funding by governments or license fees charged to the owners of receiving apparatus (the BBC in the UK, for example). Pay TV only began to become common after the widespread installation of cable television systems in the 1970s and 1980s; early premium channels were most often movie broadcasters such as the US-based Home Box Office and Cinemax, both currently owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. Signals were obtained for distribution by cable companies using C-band satellite dish antennae of up to ten feet in diameter; the first satellite signals were originally unencrypted as extremely few individual end-users could afford the large and expensive satellite receiving apparatus. As satellite dishes became smaller and more affordable, most satellite signal providers adopted various forms of encryption in order to limit reception to certain groups (such as hotels, cable companies, or paid subscribers) or to specific political regions. Early encryption attempts such as Videocipher II were common targets for pirate decryption as dismayed viewers saw large amounts of formerly-unencrypted programming vanishing. Nowadays some free-to-air satellite content in the USA still remains, but many of the channels still in the clear are ethnic channels, local over-the-air TV stations, international broadcasters, religious programming, backfeeds of network programming destined to local TV stations or signals uplinked from mobile satellite trucks to provide live news and sports coverage. Specialty channels and premium movie channels are most often encrypted; in most countries, broadcasts containing explicit pornography must be encrypted to prevent accidental viewing.
Technical issues Initial attempts to encrypt broadcast signals were based on analogue techniques of questionable security, the most common being one or a combination of techniques such as:
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