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Behind the Satellite Piracy Lawsuit
McSpew writes "This article at MSNBC is the most in-depth coverage I've seen from a mainstream news source about the $1 Billion Canal Plus lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch-owned NDS. For those not familiar with the suit, French direct-broadcast satellite (DBS) company Canal Plus alleges that NDS, a company owned by News Corp (which also owns BSkyB--Canal Plus's biggest competitor in Europe) hacked the smart cards used by Canal Plus and published the hacks on the Internet. Included in the article are conspiracy theories, a suspicious death and a look at the shady characters working for both sides." We had a previous story about this.
So if I give people my competitor's service away FREE it somehow increases my own?
Unlikely.
...should be concentrating on instead of Napster. A couple of good triple-damages laws, some rigorous enforcement (featuring rewards for turning in corporate hackers, backed by a good witness-protection program), and so elite flying squads kicking in the doors of corporate labs in Israel (those scanning electron microscopes are neither cheap nor easy to hide, and this problem disappears.
Either that or Newscorp disappears. Either way, a desireable outcome.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
In the UK there are/were four prominent pay-television services:
ITV Digital shut up shop recently due to financial problems most people have attributed to their overinvestment in football broadcasting rights (my personal belief, having been an ITV Digital customer at one point) is that there was simply a lack of choice of good channels, but that's irrelevant).
Fundamentally, it's worth noting that SECA, the system employed by Canal Plus is also the same system that was employed by onDigital - as noted in this Google cache of Hackwatch. Cracks relevant to Canal Plus were also relevant to onDigital.
In the UK Sky Digital employ the OpenTV system as opposed to SECA. Companies who also follow in this vein are ntl:digital and Telewest Broadband.
This all poses some interesting questions.
Of course they do. Back a few years ago when there were three office application suites that all had a decent market share for PC's (being WordPerfect, Lotus and MSOffice), Micro$oft released it's Office97 suite, and also offered $5-$10 try out that were nearly identical to the full suite, with exception of a 90-day expiration. This expiration was extremely easy for crackers to break (I believe as simple as altering a single byte), and downloadable patches were on the Internet within a day of the Office97 release.
This cheap way to obtain the full suite for a few dollars, rather than paying for the more expensive and better protected competitors suites destroyed their market shares and in a matter of months Micro$oft have over 95% of all office application users utilizing their own software. By the '2000' release of their office suite, the copy protection was now nearly uncrackable, but they'd already secured their monopoly. Users, no longer trained in other suites, were stuck in using whatever Micro$oft provided.
The MS part of MSNBC knows all to well the value of piracy in gaining initial pirated users who become paying customers later.
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> [conflicting information on usage] But it has been made illegal to buy/sell the equipment in Canada.
The original question was probably along the lines of: "Is it legal to download plans, PIC code, purchase discrete components, burn your own PICs, mount the components on a PCB, and hook it up to a TV?", and "Is it legal for a builder to give away such devices?"
Personally, I'd like to see the answer to those questions be "yes", with a ban on commercial manufacture/sales.
I think one of the coolest things that could happen would be for a complete design to "leak" its way onto the 'net. I've got no ethical problems with a guy building his own gear to l33ch TV. I do have an ethical problem with a guy who has the plans, refuses to share, and charges $500 for a p1r4t3 box.
Paying a satellite company for service is giving a media company money for s scarcity that's only somewhat artificial. (On one hand, the signal's landing in everyone's backyard. On the other hand, someone spent $MEGABUX to launch the sats that provide the datastreams, so there's a high barrier to entry. Launch your own damn satellite if you don't like his ;-)
But paying a DBS pirate reseller for devices based on plans and code developed through reverse engineering is merely buying into another artificial scarcity -- except that the reseller of h4x0r3d cards has a very low investment, and is thus price-gouging.
The guy cracking DBS may be a genius, but the guy in the back room selling cards has no such mad sk1llz. He's just taking advantage of the fact that the code for the cards isn't widely-available on the 'net. In that sense, he's very much like the RIAA or MPAA exec; his business model is all about a device that costs him next to nothing to reproduce, and charging you for code he didn't write. His existence depends on making sure nobody else can get the code to burn their own PICs. It's not just an artificial scarcity, it's the definition of an artificial scarcity.
If you continued to aggressively pursue the illegal sale of these boxes, but passed a law that explicitly permitted both the reverse-engineering of such datastreams and the free-as-in-beer downloading of plans and code, you could eliminate the commercial DBS piracy market in a month.
The market would then come down to two people: (1) People who choose to pay money to a DBS provider for service, or (2) people with a few less scruples who choose to pay in time/effort keeping up with the engineering arms race for service.
Is that as good for the DBS providers as a market where everyone who views, pays their share of the freight for the expenses involved in putting the sats aloft? No.
Is it better than the current situation, where we still have slightly-unscrupulous people who choose to pirate, but who, in doing so, support a line of highly unscrupulous people (i.e. whose livelihoods are based on hoarding the reverse-engineered secrets?) IMNSHO, yes.