The State - News from Aug. 9, 1985

A video “pirate” in Sacramento who intercepted high-frequency pay-television signals without paying for them violated a federal law, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled. In upholding a federal judge’s decision, the court rejected an argument by defendant Daniel Benvenuti that the anti-piracy law, which has since been revised, violated constitutional rights of free expression. The case involved a former federal statute that was changed last year to provide more protection for scrambled signals that require special decoding equipment than for unscrambled signals like those used in Sacramento. The court did not discuss the new law.