Three Arrested For Conspiring To Violate the DMCA

jtcm writes "Three men have been charged with conspiring to violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act after federal investigators found that they allegedly offered a cracker more than $250,000 to assist with breaking Dish Network's satellite TV encryption scheme: '[Jung] Kwak had two co-conspirators secure the services of a cracker and allegedly reimbursed the unidentified person about $8,500 to buy a specialized and expensive microscope used for reverse engineering smart cards. He also allegedly offered the cracker more than $250,000 if he successfully secured a Nagra card's EPROM (eraseable programmable read-only memory), the guts of the chip that is needed to reverse-engineer Dish Network's encryption.' Kwak owns a company known as Viewtech, which imports and sells Viewsat satellite receiver boxes. Dish Network's latest encryption scheme, dubbed Nagra 3, has not yet been cracked by satellite TV pirates."

Comments

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot...

[girlintraining]

Although it was eliminated by dubious judicial means shortly after becoming law, the DMCA allows for reverse-engineering for the purposes of interoperability. The entire market for these devices is based on non-interoperability. Because if the CAM became truly portable and emulated fully in software, it's a tiny step to a digital video recorder that is completely under user control receiving HDTV. Which is actually the main selling point here. They took our VCRs away, and now we're attacking people who want to get them back the only way possible; At this point it doesn't matter whether his intent was to sell descrambler boxes or not, or anyone's, because that's the only way you're getting that functionality. An irony, really, that you could be paying the same fees as someone with an "approved" box, accessing the same content, and yet wind up in jail because your equipment wasn't up to the provider's specifications... Namely, that you wanted to "time shift" the content.

Damn criminals, flaunting their freedoms in front of us... They get what they deserve, eh?

Group keying and revocation...

[nweaver]

These days, the model is very much based on some really funky group keying and key revocation, which allows the sattelite provider to revoke individual keys because each receiver has a unique key rather than a group sharing a common key.

Among other things, this makes piracy MUCH harder, because the sattelite providers can buy pirated receivers, take them to the lab, find out the key used, and revoke it, disabling that entire batch of pirated receivers without affecting normal customers.

Re:CONSPIRACY to violate a law?

[Gravedigger3]

When I was arrested as a juvenile and got charged with 2 moderately serious charges, I had 2 counts of conspiracy, which were also felonies, added for "thinking" about doing it before I actually did it.

Apparently in our justice system unless you just spontaneously do a crime with no premeditation whatsoever you are gonna get slapped with a charge for thinking about it on top of the charge itself. To this day I don't understand it.