[free-sklyarov] News Corp. accused of secretly breaking TV copy-protection scheme

[Richard M. Smith]

Hi,

Wow!  According to this Vivendi Universal lawsuit against News Corp.,
News Corp. has been accused of secretly breaking a copy-protection
scheme for V/U's digital satellite TV system and making this information
available on the Internet.  Sounds like copy-protection circumvention
has become a competitive weapon!

Ironically News Corp. has been a very vocal support of the Senator
Hollings SSSCA bill which mandates copy protection hardware in all
personal computers.

Richard M. Smith
http://www.ComputerBytesMan.com

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Vivendi's Canal Plus alleges NDS helped steal digital-TV broadcasts 
French pay-TV firm sues News Corp. unit for $1 billion 

http://www.msnbc.com/news/722857.asp?0si=-

March 12 - In a startling lawsuit, Vivendi Universal SA's Canal Plus
Group accuses rival NDS Group PLC, controlled by News Corp., of directly
aiding in the widespread pilfering of digital-TV broadcasts.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif.,
involves the TV "smart cards" that both companies produce and which are
supposed to ensure the secure delivery of digital-TV programming. The
cards, which are inserted into set-top boxes, protect satellite and
cable-TV signals from being swiped by customers who haven't paid to
receive them.

It is rare, if not unprecedented, for one media company to launch such a
frontal assault on another over the issue of piracy, which they all
agree is a crucial and potentially destructive problem. But in this
case, Canal Plus Group, of Paris, and its Canal Plus Technologies unit
allege that NDS in the late 1990s set up a massive operation at its
research laboratory in Israel to break the computer code that operates
Canal's smart card. That effort, the suit says, involved "electrical and
optical examination of the protected internal software code of the card
using expensive machinery designed and operated to defeat Canal Plus
Technologies' protective measures."   
  
After the code was successfully extracted in 1998, Canal alleges, NDS
transmitted it in a digital file to NDS Americas Inc. in California
"with instructions that it be published on the Internet," so that it
"would be freely available to anyone who wanted to use it to produce
counterfeit" Canal Plus smart cards. The suit says that, in March 1999,
the code was published on a Web site that Canal says is frequented by
counterfeiters.