The Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Work­ers' Union (CWU) is de­mand­ing that the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty of T&T (TATT) man­date all sub­scrip­tion tele­vi­sion providers re­bate cus­tomers for pro­vid­ing chan­nels for which they do not have in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty rights.

The union made the call in re­sponse to a pub­lic ad­vi­so­ry late last week in which TATT stat­ed that sub­scrip­tion tele­vi­sion providers must re­move all chan­nels for which they have no in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty rights from their lo­cal chan­nel line-ups.CWU said in a state­ment that "un­scrupu­lous providers" were charg­ing sub­scribers for chan­nels they were ac­tu­al­ly steal­ing from in­ter­na­tion­al providers of en­ter­tain­ment.

"This rev­e­la­tion is al­so an in­dict­ment against TATT who is sup­posed to be the legal­ly es­tab­lished reg­u­la­to­ry body," the union said, adding that there is need for a com­pre­hen­sive re­view of the op­er­a­tions of TATT to en­sure that they pro­vide time­ly reg­u­la­to­ry over­sight and in­ter­ven­tion on be­half of cit­i­zens as pre­scribed by the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Act.

The CWU said it is not sat­is­fied that TATT has ful­filled its role and func­tions like it is sup­posed to. It said the agency's role is to en­sure that con­sumers in the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions/ICT mar­ket re­ceive val­ue for mon­ey and are sub­ject to fair pric­ing arrange­ments.TATT said its ad­vi­so­ry is ap­plic­a­ble to providers who have not yet launched ser­vice, in­clud­ing Massy Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, Open Tele­com and Dig­i­cel.

"All providers are work­ing as­sid­u­ous­ly to ob­tain al­ter­na­tive chan­nels for con­sumer pack­ages which will con­tribute to the over­all view­er­ship ex­pe­ri­ence. This pull down and re­place­ment process has al­ready com­menced," TATT saidThe chan­nels which will be af­fect­ed are those which are not avail­able be­cause rights for them are not avail­able to the Caribbean, as well as those for which rights have not been ac­quired by the provider.

TATT said it was jus­ti­fied in tak­ing the ac­tion to en­sure T&T is in com­pli­ance with in­ter­na­tion­al in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty treaties and agree­ments to which it is a sig­na­to­ry.The 16 chan­nels which TATT said must be re­moved by all sub­scrip­tion ca­ble tele­vi­sion providers in­clude ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, En­core West­ern, MyTV33, TLC, USA Net­work, VH-1 USA and WGN.

In re­sponse to the TATT di­rec­tive, Di­recTV has pub­lished ad­ver­tise­ments as­sur­ing its sub­scribers that they have noth­ing to wor­ry about. In a news­pa­per ad­ver­tise­ment, Di­recTV said all its pro­gram­ming is au­tho­rised and the TATT or­der will not neg­a­tive­ly af­fect its ser­vice.