The Guardian: Murdoch chief threatens to sue BBC
“We don’t believe the BBC has the right to provide an unencrypted signal with our programming,” said Peter Chernin, who is chief operating officer of News Corp.
“We are not happy and we are also sort of shocked. The BBC is not some renegade company. It’s a public trust in a society that does have copyright laws and one top of that it is one of the great content producers. We think that what they are doing is wrong,” he added.
With an encrypted satellite signal, where only subscribers in the UK who subscribe to receive the signal could view the BBC channels, because the BBC would only sell subscriptions to satellite customers in the UK. When the signal is unencrypted, any satellite television viewer in Europe could pick up the BBC feed, subscriber or not. Shifting to unencrypted distribution would save the BBC some of the £85m it pays to BskyB, which is partially owned by News Corp., for encrypted satellite distribution.
