Two telecom operators will have to pay a fine for providing subscribers with illegal access to sports TV channels, incorporated into the holding Media Group Ukraine.
The Bila Tserkva internet provider “Magnus Limited” and the Kyiv provider Wnet were judicially found guilty of providing illegal IPTV services and rebroadcasting TV channels “Football 1” and “Football 2”. This is stated by the law firm “Vindex”, which deals with protecting intellectual property rights.
The court ruling binds these operators to pay some compensation to the rights holder LLC “TRC Ukraina”. The amount of fine is UAH 64,000 for each operator.
“The feature of that litigation was the operational scheme for providing IPTV services, invented by those providers, which was investigated in detail by the court and finally declared illegal”, as the statement says.
The concept of the scheme was as follows: IPTV services were provided directly by the resource tvbuzzer.net, and the “Magnus Limited” and Wnet, as Internet providers, only provided access to the multimedia content of that resource.
However, the lawyers of “Vindex” managed proving to the court that the very multimedia content is TV channels, with “Football 1” and “Football 2” among others. Since the rights holder did not grant any authorization for such content rebroadcasts, so this was a violation of his rights.
“An important issue in the trial was to adhere to the “unavoidability of punishment” principle, since the police previously closed the criminal proceedings on the matter. However, the supporting investigative evidence enabled bringing violators to justice under economic procedure”, as pointed out by Pavel Mikolyuk, Director of the law firm “Vindex”.
