Above: A dread, dead pirate. Photo by prometeus/DepositPhotos.

BitDepth#1302 for May 20, 2021

The Telecommunications Authority of TT (TATT) decided to start this week with some excitement, issuing a press release last Friday at 4pm that threatened legal action, to the tune of fines of $250,000 and ten year’s imprisonment for anyone found selling Android boxes set up to stream illegally obtained content.

This followed a warning action issued in 2018, which led to exactly nothing beyond earning TATT significant ill-will, and encouraging uncomfortable questions about their extended forbearance with cable companies broadcasting channels that could, at best, be described as gray market.

It was hard to imagine a worse time to target potential sources of entertainment as the country plunged deeper into lockdown and the nation was generally reeling from the implications of a freshly imposed State of Emergency and curfew.

TATT is targeting simple devices capable of accessing the Internet and linking to repositories of pirated television programming and movies.

Since practically nobody, anywhere, was selling anything much at all, it seemed an odd bit of timing, particularly since the police were more likely to be busy chasing after unmasked limers, not couples sitting at home watching pirated streams of Lucifer.

TATT might actually have been doing the country more good if it dropped off some Android boxes for the stream deprived to give them a reason to stay home.
But that would be illegal, let’s not forget that.

The curious press release put me to mind of the video store that operated right around the corner from my home office with impunity for a decade, a convenient stop for police officers looking for movies for the weekend.

I remember my nephew Joel on a visit from Houston, standing slack-jawed in the store a decade ago, stunned at being in the presence of hundreds of items of stolen property neatly arranged on racks.
It was probably his first time being surrounded so comprehensively by ill-gotten gains and public iniquity.

The press release proved so poorly-worded and tone-deaf that by Tuesday this week, TATT had issued an FAQ explaining the wording of the press release.

TATT’s clarification noted that “When content creators and those employed in the entertainment industry are not compensated for their work this reduces the incentive to create and could eventually lead to a reduction in the amount of content, as well as the variety of content that is currently enjoyed. People should be paid for their work.”

Since TATT is working with the TT Intellectual Property Office on this anti-Android box project, it’s worth pondering where all this concern was when entire stolen cinema libraries were being sold by the thousands in cubby-hole stores and on racks on street corners.

Or, for that matter, where was all this effort and concern about policing IP infringements was when the livelihoods of calypsonians and soca artistes was being yanked from their pockets by widespread roadside piracy of their music?
YouTube and the Julian’s Promos video channel ended that particular regime of theft.

No police raid closed my corner video store. Faster broadband and readily accessible torrents did. Why pay $5 or $10 for a disc when you could just watch the show on a computer? Or, these days, a smartphone?

Not wishing a visit from GG’s IP forces, I won’t list the many apps for Android phones, smart TVs and tablets that do what Android boxes do without any of the fuss.

The world, it is safe to say, has moved in three years since TATT last fulminated about Android boxes.
That premium product on cable? Movies on demand? That’s now called streaming and it’s the first serious alternative to online video piracy.

Netflix scored the first major beachhead in TT in 2011, and limping along behind it are Amazon, Apple and Disney.
The timer is slowly counting down on the artificial limitations of geofencing and timed delivery that hampered the appeal of early streaming services outside the US as studios and producers realise that the best way to beat piracy is to get to customers first with better quality.

Covid19 decisively sped up that clock, as studios no longer had any reliable market in cinemas and began releasing their films directly to streaming.

Apple’s iTunes store, the first significantly successful online music store, proved that the problem often held the seeds of a solution, but it takes savvy and risk to achieve that.

There won’t be any rewinding on this doomsday clock for programmed entertainment. A generation of children is coming of age with neither an understanding of, nor patience with video that can’t be paused or fast-forwarded.

Does TATT have actionable information on massive importations of Android boxes? Tipoffs about warehouses full of the things? Why is the authority chasing after a technology that’s already dying?

Is this public pillorying of a lame piracy technique a vigorous bobolee beating to draw attention away from TATT’s lax and careless approach to intellectual property in the broadcast entertainment sector for decades?

What’s up TATT?