Cable company's award upheld

Cable company's award upheld

	Published : Fri, 29 Jun 2007 21:49 By : Agencies Print this Story

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) - The 8th U.S. District Court of Appeals has upheld a ruling ordering an Omaha man to pay almost $2.2 million to a cable television company for illegally selling cable descramblers in the 1990s.

Ronald J. Abboud, sole officer and shareholder of the now-defunct Multi-Vision Electronics, in September was ordered to pay damages to Comcast of Illinois after selling the descramblers through magazine advertisements and on the Web.

Abboud appealed, claiming U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Bataillon erred by granting a summary judgment to Comcast and abused his discretion in awarding damages, among other things.

In its opinion Friday, the appeals court affirmed all parts of the lower court's ruling.

Mark Novotny, the local attorney representing Comcast, was out of town and unavailable to comment. Attempts to reach Abboud were unsuccessful, and his attorney, Brent Kuhn, did not return a phone message left at his office.

Multi-Vision, dissolved in 1999 for not paying taxes, advertised descrambling equipment in the magazine Nuts and Volts and on a Swedish Web site in 1993, according to court records.

Cable television signals are scrambled so subscribers can't receive programming for which they haven't paid. A subscriber must have a converter box, or descrambler, connected to a TV to receive the programming.

Comcast, like other cable companies, offers subscribers a descrambler for which they pay a rental fee.

It's possible for an individual to circumvent the encoding system by installing an unauthorized descrambler that decodes the signals and receives programming the individual has not purchased.

In 2003, while investigating illegal descrambler sales by Abboud's brother, Steven, federal marshals found documents related to the sales of descramblers by Multi-Vision. Based on that information, Comcast took action against Multi-Vision and Ronald Abboud.

Multi-Vision was accused of distributing descramblers from 1991 to 1999 in violation of the Cable Communications Policy Act, which says no one shall 'intercept or receive or assist in intercepting or receiving any communication service offered over a cable system unless authorized to do so by a cable operator.'

Comcast contended that by selling descramblers, Abboud assisted in the unauthorized interception of cable services.

Abboud said in his appeal that the three-year statute of limitations had run out when Comcast initiated legal action. Though Multi-Vision's descrambler sales ended in 1999, the appeals court said, Comcast didn't know about the illegal activity until February 2003.

Abboud also contended that the district court miscalculated damages, which was based on gross revenue reported on income tax returns. Abboud said Bataillon erred in not taking into account deductions that had been claimed.

But the appeals court said Multi-Vision did not justify the deductions and that the district court rightfully rejected the deductions because a taxpayer has an incentive to report exceedingly high figures for deductions.