A court in the Ukrainian Zaporozhye region has sentenced a resident for illegally distributing Media Group Ukraine (MGU) sports channels Futbol 1 and 2.
In a statement MGU says that an investigation into the case began with an advertisement distributed at the end of 2019 on the internet. It offered to buy and connect smart-set-top boxes with which one could watch the channels in the Zaporozhye region. Vindex, the legal representative on MGU, then passed the information on to law enforcement agencies.
Commenting on the case, Valentyn Soldatenko, head of combatting cybercrime in the region, said that the piracy interfered in the work of the telecom networks of TRK Ukraina and violated the criminal code of Ukraine.
Pavlo Mykolyuk, director of Vindex, added: “this verdict is really important for us, because after the coding of the signal by the right holder, TRK Ukraina, the facts of card sharing were a thing of the past. But now there are facts of illegal distribution of coded signals via the internet: Therefore, we have found solutions to capture these illegal facts, and we emphasise once again that the only legal and safe way to provide television services in Ukraine via the Internet is legal OTT services and partner providers of TRK Ukraina, which guarantee quality television signal and service “.