Direct TV Law Suit Against Canadian :: Sues For Piracy

El Segundo, CA - Canadian TV pirates will walk the plank if US satellite distributotrs get their way.Direct TV has filed a lawsuit in a Canadian court against a known signal thief who flouted a permanent injunction order imposed last year to stop selling piracy technology used to steal Direct TV programming.

 
The complaint alleges that Elio Gino D'Amario, of Hamilton, ON, has continued to sell pirate devices on his Web site in violation of a permanent injunction entered against him in a U.S. District Court and the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in July 2004. The complaint against D'Amario was the result of an investigation conducted by the Direct TV Office of Signal Integrity.

The Canadian action follows on the heels of recent Direct TV lawsuits filed in the U.S. District Court in New York and Philadelphia against six individuals it claims were setting up false subscription accounts and illegally activating Direct TV receivers.

The suits claim that the defendants, along with some 100 unidentified defendants (listed as John Does in the complaint), created false subscription accounts and illegally activated numerous access cards and receivers to enable others to receive Direct TV programming without authorization or proper payment to Direct TV.

D'Amario was identified in 1999 as operating a network of companies and Web sites engaged in selling Direct TV satellite piracy technology to customers in both the United States and Canada and has been the subject of several injunctions beginning in 2002.

Since September of last year, when Direct TV sued a Utah couple over allegations of fraud and filed a lawsuit in Florida against seven individuals for the same offense, half a dozen addional lawsuits involving allegations of fraud have been filed by Direct TV.

Earlier this year Direct TV targeted 19 Canadian citizens and five businesses that it believed were participating in a scheme to activate fraudulent Direct TV accounts, and last April filed a complaint against 10 former Direct TV customer service agents, who it believes engaged in a scheme to defraud Direct TV by creating subscription accounts with false information and fraudulently linking access cards to existing accounts that enabled others to receive Direct TV programming.

Direct TV is also seeking a contempt order against D'Amario based on his flagrant breach of the permanent injunction granted by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in 2004.
Contempt of such orders can have serious consequences.

In a case last month, Billy Boudreau, a Canadian citizen who was operating a pirate Web site, was sentenced to nine months in prison after the judge found him in contempt for breaching an Anton Piller order, which provides for the right to search premises without prior warning and is used to prevent the destruction of incriminating evidence.

("Anton Pillar" orders are made by the court to search and seize in a civil action. They are used by a would-be plaintiff as a precursor to instituting proceedings. Anton Pillar applications are not public; the purpose to to conceal intention to seize property from the other side in a proceeding, in order to avoid any property being destroyed by that party.)
 

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