I have become aware of a person in my area who is bootlegging satellite TV decoder cards.

The way I understand it is: You get yourself a satellite dish (DSS) and sign up for the cheapest package. Then, you take the decoder card to this person. He does something to the card with his computer (people say he "zaps" the card) which unlocks it so that ALL the DSS channels can be received free of charge. This of course means all those MOVIE channels.

At first I was just annoyed by this, but after thinking about all these people staying home watching free satellite TV when they might otherwise be coming to movies (not to mention the outright theft of service by people using these cards) I just got damn mad.

From what I've heard, this guy has done this with many, many of these cards. Everyone I've talked to says it's in the hundreds. So we're not talking about a small time thing here.

I looked at the DSS website to see if they had any kind of "report piracy" link, but found nothing.

So my questions are: Should I turn this person in? And if so, to whom do I turn him in?

Say you have a PlayStation. You install a chip into it so it can play import and CDR games. Illegal? Hell no. It's your PlayStation and you can add chips, throw it around the room, pee on it, whatever you want. Of course you ruin your warranty. Sony decided to start making CD drives that cannot read CDRs and trying to change the innards of the PlayStation so it cannot be chipped (they still can be. People are smarter than companies, which is why it will always be possible to crack the DVD code).

AFAIK, cable and satellite providers usually offer rewards if the report results in prosecution of the pirate. Informants may request to remain anonymous.

Any radio signal that comes into "my back yard" is fair game... If other people have the right to broadcast a signal then I have the right to "listen" to it. If I can figure out a way to decode encrypted data I have the right to do that too.

Now, that having been said, there's still the theft of service issue. Is the guy doing the modifications "selling" theft of service? If the guy was selling the "knowledge" of how to intercept any given satellite signal then I would say NO. The part about people signing up for the cheapest subscription possible and getting the rest of the channels for free would lead me to believe that the answer is YES.

Nothing ever happened with it. I don't remember the specifics, but it didn't amount to much more than a slap on the wrist (which, of course, wasn't publicized). We figured the main thing they wanted to do was have the arrest all over television, to scare other people out of doing it.

From what I've been able to gather, this guy is selling these bootlegged cards for $400. If it's true that he's got hundreds out there, that's a nice chunk of money!

After a while, DSS gets wise to a person using scrambled channels without authorization, and disables that card. (I saw in an internet article somewhere that they never bother to prosecute "customers," they tend to only go after illegal dealers.)

When that happens, the "customer" simply goes back to the bootlegger and gets another card! Nice?

The person who clued me in to a lot of this told me that this guy is "amazingly open" about all this. Like he's not even worried about getting caught.

I like the anonymizer e-mail idea. I'll start composing a couple of mails and will let you all know what happens, if anything. Thanks everyone for the advice.

I'll watch movies on TCM or ARTS, but I check any Bravo movies ass end before I start watching. Mostly I ignore them.

Someone had the tv version of the original "Shaft" playing recently. It was a wonder that there was any dialog left. After about five minutes, I gave up on it.

The only reason I bother with tv any more is my Tivo box. It records those films I forget to set the VCR for, and the fast forward and other features are superior to video tape.

Praise Allah for sh*t tv and censored movies. It keeps people going to see the real thing.

I have a REPLAY box. I just love it. I could go on for many pages about it. I'll be glad to answer any specific questions via e-mail. But for now, answers to Joe's questions:

How is the video quality? Is there artifacting?

My box has 3 recording speeds: Standard, Medium and High. Standard has significant artifacting, but is fine for a show that you just want to see one time. I would compare it to slow speed VHS. My box will handle 30 hours at this speed. Medium is much better. Slightly better than SP speed on VHS. Good for archiving, but only about 15 hours available. High quality is excellent, but only 10 hours available. I record most things at STANDARD, and I'm OK with that.

One ANT/CATV coax line in, 2 RCA stereo audio/video (one with S-Video)

Outputs are 2 RCA Stereo audio/video (one with S-Video)

Roses are Red.

The channel guide is included in the price on Replay. It calls out once each night to update. Yes, I can tell the box to manually record.

One other nice feature is that it can record and play back simultaneously.

Contrary to what 60 minutes said, mine took about 1-hour to set up and configure. That included time to call Replay because my cable box was not listed in the book.

I especially like the little button on the remote that skips ahead 30 seconds everytime I hit it. Advertisers do NOT like me at all.

Mark Lensenmayer