Friday, July 28, 2006

Discovering Polish TV Pirates in Chicago


Earlier this week, while doing a little research at the federal court house in Chicago, I came across a case involving Polish television station TVN (my former employer from waaaay back when it was just being launched). Turns out TVN was suing some people in Chicago for putting their television programs on the Internet -- without permission, of course -- and charging people to stream or download them. I found one more case like that involving TVN and then located two more cases against the same people brought by TVN's competitor, Polsat. All four cases involving two web sites, Telewizja Plus and Polska Wizja, were filed on the same day in May. Both sites are pretty much dead now.

So I forwarded the complaints and related documents to my pal Vadim Makarenko at Gazeta Wyborcza, still Poland's largest daily. Vadim, in my humble opinion the best media reporter in Poland, decided to look further into the matter. And today Wyborcza is running a nice long story entitled: How Polsat and TVN are battling Internet pirates (in Polish). Pretty cool intercontinental cooperation, I must say.

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