[A quibble: News Corp. certainly has been supportive of the draft SSSCA -- I don't know if I'd call them a "very vocal" supporter. See my interview with their lobbyist and parse the language for yourself: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,46671,00.html --Declan] --- From: "Richard M. Smith" <rmsat_private> To: "'Declan McCullagh'" <declanat_private> Subject: News Corp. accused of secretly breaking TV copy-protection scheme Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 08:58:33 -0800 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 ====================================================================== 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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