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Vivendi Universal vs. News Corporation
timbo_red writes: "According to a BBC story, NDS, a company 80% owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp is being sued by Canal+ for allegedly cracking their smart cards, which could have had a serious effect on ITV digital, the major UK competitor to Murdochs Sky digital in the UK pay TV market."
So it seems that Canal+ are alledging that NDS (which News Corp alledges operates independantly despite being 80$ owned by NC) cracked their smart cards and published the result online! Either something very sinister happened (but I can't see how this would benefit NC as it would simply provide digital TV service of the wrong kind to their potential customers also) or this is the act of one person (or a very small group) within NDS who were stupid enough to post the crack from a trackable IP. It would be nice to know more, anyone have any substantial links?
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
So, according to the article, NDS spent "huge sums" cracking the codes. It seems to me, that if the codes were sound, it should have been mathematically impossible for them to crack it for any amount of money (short of an optical, or quantum computer, of course). And if they weren't, why did they need to spend so much money on it?
DeCSS didn't have any huge backing...
Remarkably, the article doesn't mention if the DMCA is being invoked. It probably won't be, because then it would be applied in the manner Congress actually meant, which would break the perfect record of the DMCA only being misused. Also, News Corp. and it's subsidiaries are quite capable of fighting a legal battle of almost any scope and duration. This would increase the risk of an actual court precedent against the DMCA. Once again, this would break the perfect record of the DMCA only being invoked against relatively powerless victims. The DMCA is far too powerful a tool for misuse for anyone to risk it's long and promising future.
Here in Morocco, Canal+ Horizons (the digital service for Morocco) shut down because of local piracy of FRENCH Canal+. (in French)
I think it has a lot to do with clever hackers and the Internet propagating stuff, and very little to do with some big corporation.
It may be, however, that someone working there just happened to be a pirate at the same time, since he'd have had access to hardware to help him to crack Canal+.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
"ITV Digital may be more popular than had been thought," a source close to the case told BBC News Online.
Hmm. ITV's premuim channels clearly make their money from subscription fees, so who cares if your service is popular with people who aren't willing to buy it? ITV's regular stations appear to have commercials, so maybe it wouldn't hurt them to drop their prices and encourage folks to watch them legally.
When big boys like this start duking it out over greed based issues, and lets be honest thats what this is, the end is near, It woulda been more fun to see say sony vs disney or maybe someone else they dont already own :)
:)
Remerber when Ibm started trying to sue all the clone makers ? Or apple. Remeber when Sony sued over the betamax, or so on so forth.
I think what happens is greed reaches an apex, it cannot make money off going after the little guys distributing css, (it can try to limi it) but at some point it all falls like a house of cards when companies like this focus all their energies out of squeezing every last cent out of anyone for any reason , and in the process become a company for which litigation is their core business. V/Unv core business is supposed to be entertainment. I wouldnt know I have boycotted any materials, my small part in the struggle. But it seems no longer like a company interested in entertainment but more so litigation.
When companies like these start running around suing each other its often too late and they are only trying to salvage what they can, or make a stnd where they are, anyone know their current financials ? (the real ones please
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
"NDS spent huge sums cracking the code on Canal Plus smart cards, and handed the code to a website used by fraudsters, documents filed in a California court allege."
IF... they cracked any sort of code, that should be enough to subject them to the DMCA, unless there is some sort of jurisdictional issue at play. Nevertheless, if they do business in the U.S., then the DMCA would apply to them (ask Elcomsoft).
I thought all TV in the UK was pay. I.e. the governement collected money for each TV you own so it could run the BBC.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
There is a difference between saying a problem is computationally infeasible and that it is believed to be hard. When we say something like 'a sufficiently sized one-time-pad is mathematically impossible to break', it is something of a hyperbole. Of course it's /mathematically/ possible, a simple guessing algorithm will terminate and output the plaintext and the pad. However, as has been observed, to do this with, say a 512-bit pad would require much more energy then is available to us on this planet assuming the theoretical bounds for energy consumption can be reached!
/known/ to be infeasible, as is the one-time pad. We simply haven't found feasible solutions, nor have we found complexity analyses for these problems that demonstrate feaasible solutions to be possible. The effective difference is that it would be quite possible (although unlikey, since generations of the best mathematicians have been working on these problems) for someone to come along and demonstrate a solution to a particular problem, rendering a particular class of cryptographic methods useless...
What is interesting to note however, is that the 'hard' problems we use in most string crypto are not
There is a website that has been set up by Canal+ here: http://www.actiononecanalplus.com/
Among other things it has a copy of the papers which show that C+ have filed under:
Complaint for Unfair Competition, Copyright Infringement, Violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, Tortious Interference, Conspiracy and Violation of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
They are demanding a jury trial.