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FCC Asks Amazon and eBay To Stop Selling Fake Pay TV Boxes (techcrunch.com)
Last week, the Federal Communications Commission sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and eBay CEO Devin Wenig asking their companies to help remove the listings for fake pay TV boxes from their respective websites. From a report: These boxes often falsely bear the FCC logo, the letter informed, and are used to perpetuate "intellectual property theft and consumer fraud." With the rise in cord cutting, a number of consumers have found it's just as easy to use an app like Kodi on a cheap streaming media device to gain access to content â" like TV shows and movies -- that they would otherwise miss out on by dropping their pay TV subscription. As an added perk, various software add-ons enable consumers to stream movies still in the theaters, too. It's an easier way to access pirated content than visiting The Pirate Bay and downloading torrent files.
But they make it really clear in the letter that it's really the piracy angle that is the actual concern.
I read the letter. It's the fraudulent use of FCC logo and claim of certification that is the issue. Let's recap:
Paragraph 1 deals with fraudulent FCC logo and failure to certify the device.
Paragraph 2 deals with fraudulent FCC logo and failure to certify the device.
Paragraph 3 deals with fraudulent FCC logo and failure to certify the device.
Paragraph 4 talks about removing devices that are intended to facilitate intellectual property theft.
Paragraph 5 deals with "unlawful devices", which is because these are not certified and have false FCC logos.
Paragraph 6 deals with fraudulent FCC logo and failure to certify the device.
Paragraph 7 thanks both companies first for "upholding the Commission's equipment authorization process" and then for fighting IP theft, and then fighting consumer fraud. Two of the three "thanks" are for FCC certification fraud.
It would seem that the failure to certify the devices and use of the FCC logo fraudulently is the majority, if not the vast majority, of what the letter is about. To claim that the "actual concern" is IP theft ignores the "elephant in the letter". As the letter puts it, it is "outside the jurisdiction of the Commission" to take any action based on piracy, but they certainly have jurisdiction and sufficient cause to order the withdrawal of sale of such equipment based on FCC and other federal regulations, whether or not piracy is involved in any way. In fact, if either eBay or Amazon are actually participants in the sale they could be fined for those sales.