Canadian News Brief - Bill C-2 will make it a criminal offence to purchase American satellite TV signals.

The new legislation will affect the theft and tampering of satellite TV signals by increasing the penalties from $25,000 and six months in jail to $200,000 and one year in jail.

The legislation will also cover the grey area which includes people paying to watch US satellite TV signals that are not licensed in Canada. Bill C-2 will eliminate "grey area marketing" by making the subscription to American TV signals an offence.

The Coalition Against Satellite Signal Theft (CAAST) supports the bill because it will make it financially and punitively damaging to all those involved in this kind of theft. The industry feels it will decrease TV signal theft by strengthening the ability of law enforcement to combat the problem of TV signal theft.

Systems Integrity Specialists, Bush-Waterhouse Audit Services [1], have developed a system which will detect illegal satellite TV receiver systems. In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, company Director James Scott-Wilson stated, "We hope to see this system in use industry wide by the 3rd quarter of 2007. Our use of state-of-the-art technologies makes the system extremely accurate."