A team of hackers hired by NDS has been accused of flooding the market with pirated smart cards for the US DTH platform DISH, a Californian District Court heard on Wednesday.
The case has been brought by EchoStar Communications against NDS, the smart card security division of News Corp, operator of rival platform DirecTV.
In opening statements, NDS attorney Richard Stone said the company had done nothing illegally to harm or damage EchoStar, but was simply engaged in reverse engineering by obtaining the codes.
The so-called Black Hat Team was said to have rounded up the leading protagonists in smart card piracy in 1998, when the NDS system used by DirecTV was under constant attack by pirates.
The operation was shut down in 2001 following a raid on the home of hacker Chris Tarnovsky. The suit names the NDS research facility in Haifa, Israel as the primary location where the pirated cards were created.
NDS admits it worked with Tarnovsky, but says the primary purpose was to shut down pirate operations.Echostar is claiming copyright violation, conspiracy, and piracy.
The case continues.
