Last year, law enforcement officers initiated 28 cases of administrative violations, as well as 13 criminal proceedings, against distributors of illegal content. This year has also started actively – in the first three months, 16 administrative violation cases and four criminal proceedings have already been initiated against television pirates.
“Usually it is a man, 35-40 years old, who has previous experience working in a company that provided television and internet services,” says Vitalijs Polovinskis, deputy head of the Economic Crimes Department of the State Police.
According to the police, usually these people have connections in Russia, which also allows them to obtain the necessary equipment – small-sized boxes, with which it is possible to provide illegal content to customers.
The State Police admits that previously most of the pirated channels were provided by satellite dishes, but now it has all been replaced by the Internet. And this means that it has become more difficult to catch the consumers and distributors of such illegal content, but it is not impossible.
In addition, the illegals themselves have also gone even deeper underground, because since 2022, criminal liability is also threatened for this concern. Law enforcers believe that harsher punishments have already borne fruit – there have been fewer TV pirates, and the circle of their customers has also narrowed. If in the past they could have even hundreds and even more customers, now they are more often just a few dozen households. In addition, the belief that illegal content is most widespread in the Latgale region is wrong.
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“The density of people speaks of the fact that there could be more potential violators in the Riga region than in the Latgale region. Therefore, we cannot claim that more Russian TV channels are watched in the Latgale region than elsewhere,” says Polovinskis.
The police say that there are different reasons why people look for illegal offers. Others do not realize that they have bought a pirated service, someone who wants to watch sports, of course, there is no shortage of Kremlin supporters either.
“It is clear that there are such people, but I cannot say that what we have established in our criminal proceedings is the majority. Because overall the situation is quite positive,” says Polovinskis.
The fact that the situation is improving is also assessed by the National Council of Electronic Media, for which the fight against the distribution of illegal content after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has become one of its main priorities. Last year, the council restricted 132 websites and blocked 300 video content streaming sites.
“Realistically, we can’t eradicate these pirate pages, but we can drive them to an increasingly low-quality and low-quality segment, where a person has to make a choice in the end, whether he wants to watch something like that at all,” said Ivars Āboliņš, chairman of the National Council of Electronic Media.
The council and the police also remind that private individuals may also face a fine of up to 700 euros for watching banned television channels using illegal devices.
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