You guys are applying a consumer access control mindset (hostility-oriented) to how big businesses interact mutually.
Within the cable industry, a deal simply would have been struck allowing providers not carrying WGN America to descramble it anyway, without payment to WGN, for the sake of obtaining access to the Prevue Guide VBI data. Those cable systems would then have been on the honor system to simply not pipe WGN through to their customers.
Generally, there is no "policeman in the machine" in the professional world. For example, there's no such thing as professional video or audio gear that obeys copy-protection signals. And in cases where "policemen in the machine"
do exist, like with satellite encryption or scrambling, free exemptions can often easily be had as courtesies for various reasons. Walk into any local television station, for instance, and you will often find a Dish Network or DirecTV set-top box fully authorized for absolutely every channel. The reason: the newsies. When you're watching WNYW's 10 o'clock news in New York and see clips from a Lakers game with a "Fox Sports Los Angeles" logo in the corner of the screen, it's because they probably got it off their DirecTV box with all the regional sports channels forced on. Etc. In the professional world, access is a secondary concern; you're simply expected to honestly report and pay for anything you actually use. Same logic for WGN and Prevue Guide. As long as the cable companies not paying for WGN didn't give it to their subscribers, WGN wouldn't have cared less if those cable companies were descrambling it for other reasons.
Besides, these people have ways of checking up on how well others are obeying the honor system. Remember when you were a kid, and Nickelodeon constantly had advertisements to send in a postcard for a chance to win some cheesy prize? And when the Disney Channel did too? As well as all the other channels? Well, contests do raise ratings, sure. But can you guess what their ulterior motive was? If you guessed finding out which zip codes (which cable companies) were carrying their signals, you guessed right. Back when C/Ku-band satellite feeds weren't scrambled (and even for many years after they first were, given how the early VC scrambling methods were easily pwned), giving a couple kids free t-shirts every month was a really cheap way to find out which cable companies to send their $1,000,000/hour lawyers crawling up the asses of with flashlights. (This trick went out of fashion when more secure encryption schemes got popular; as well as when cable industry competition from DBS providers started skewing the results.) Another example: radio stations generally get their music libraries for free. (If they pay anything, it's only for duplilcation should they use "library in a can" services like
TM-Century.) Yet to make sure stations paid their royalties for on-air performances, record companies actually hired people to listen to the stations in their areas and log the songs heard. (Nowadays, there are computerized listening posts in most markets that automatically make those logs, using audio pattern recognition software to identify all the music. Commercials too. Sponsors like knowing if their money actually gets their advertisements heard on air.)
So, yeah. The honor system. With occasional spying.
Anyway, and back to WGN, it was really easy in their case for cable companies to get access. United Video was the company responsible for
putting WGN on satellite, after all. With Prevue Guide's owners controlling WGN's VCII+ descrambling keys, any cable companies not carrying WGN but running Prevue Guide wouldn't have even needed to deal with WGN directly.
