:> In Canada, it is not sufficient that one has paid the :> broadcaster for reception rights: one has to restrict :> oneself to domestic broadcasters (ExpressVu or StarChoice) :> for such signals [but unencrypted FTA is legal.]
:I'm surprised. Why should the US laws and FCC regs have :any effect in Canada (beyond broadcast treaties)? Does :Canadian law have a provision incorporating US law?
The situation in Canada is independant of US law, except perhaps in the indirect sense of copyright and contract law.
It was pretty clear under Canadian law that unauthorized reception/ decoding of satellite TV signals was illegal: we implimented the Berne Convention on Copyrights years before the US did, we didn't have anything resembling the First Amendment until relatively recently (1982), and we have no legal history that '"freedom of speech" includes "freedom to listen" to that which to "speaker" does not want heard'.
We also had CRTC regulations governing domestic licensing of TV, cable, satellite, and other like forms of transmissions [but no-one has advanced a serious argument that the CRTC governs Internet
*content*... though it does have some control over the provision of data circuits.] The CRTC is, amongst other things, a instrument for bilingualism and retention of national culture [e.g., Canadian Content rules.] But more-so, the CRTC is an instrument for enforcing exclusive Canadian distribution rights (including, and this turns out to be a big contention, the right to substitute Canadian commercials for the US commercials.) The overall effect is that to deliver content to Canadian markets, you need a permit, and you aren't likely to get a permit unless you can convince the CRTC that the major media companies have no interest at all in going after that market any time in the next 20 years or so. Thus, it's best to be applying with respect to content that the existing major companies don't believe they could make a profit in serving.
Now, what was -not- completely clear under Canadian law was the situation in which a customer was willing to pay a US satellite company [e.g., Dish Networks] full retail value for the equipment and channels used. This situation did not fall under the "theft of service" arguments because the customers were paying and the US providers were willing to serve those customers. [I heard a figure at one point that up to 20% of Dish's customers were in Canada -- an amazing number when you consider the 10:1 population ratio.] The RCMP used to "turn a blind eye" on the situation, especially in rural areas where cable TV didn't reach: what harm, after all, is being done by a customer willingly paying the asking price for a service that was perfectly legal at it's point of origin. They'd go after the illict decoders, but ignore the people with paid equipment. The government and RCMP were, though, heavily pressured by StarChoice and ExpressVu to respect the exclusive distribution agreements that those companies had, so they set up a couple of high profile raids of stores, grabbed customer lists, and charged the store owners.
The main case went right up to the Supreme Court of Canada, which ruled that Yes, the law -did- give the CRTC jurisdiction to decide which signals to allow or not, and thus that it was indeed the CRTC's perogative to ban the importation of foreign satellite signals even when "grey market" [paid for] decoders were being used. judgement did take note that there was a Charter of Rights argument that could be made about free speech, but that that was not what the case they had in front of them was about: the case had come up through the path of whether the CRTC had jurisdiction in such cases, so in deciding that the CRTC did have that jurisdiction, the CRTC-claimed ban on importation of signals was upheld. The Supreme Court judgement practically invited people to start a new case upon the issue of whether the CRTC regulatory procedures were "justifiable" limitations upon free speech "in a just and democratic Western society".
From a US perspective, the issue was whether or not Canada would uphold copyright law and "exclusive distribution" contracts... from that perspective, Canada didn't really have any choice in the matter, not without serious kerfuffle that would spill over into all manner of contracts. Too high a stakes to not recognize the validity of the contracts.
If there is to be a successful challenge to the law, then it will come from an ethnic community which is unable to gain access to programming related to its own language, culture, and religion, and the argument will be that since StarChoice and ExpressVu have expressed complete disinterest in serving those markets, that it is an unreasonable imposition upon the members of the community to be denied access to stations that are already there in the aether and for which they are willing to pay reasonable access fees. Community members would have to present copies of letters requesting access from those companies, and copies of the companies' replies that they weren't interested in providing that service. I have reason to believe that that sort of evidence is available.