NDS has picked up a total of $18,935,399.49 (€14,390,903) as payment from EchoStar following the resolution of the long running EchoStar-Dish hacking case.
“This brings an end to this long drawn-out process in which we vehemently denied all allegations of piracy which were made against us over a decade ago,” said Dr Abe Peled, executive chairman, NDS Group. “Piracy is an issue throughout the industry and injurious to all in the value chain; it is only with the active anti-piracy efforts of companies such as ourselves that the pay-TV industry is able to evolve and continue to enable people to enjoy premium TV viewing.”
Dating back to 2003, NDS had been accused of maliciously hiring a team of hackers in order to crack the Nagra conditional access technology used by Dish on its US satellite platform in the 1990s.
A key ruling came in August 2010, when the Ninth Circuit awarded NDS the $18 million sum and concluded there to be: “No question that NDS successfully defended against all of EchoStar’s claims based on or related to its theory that NDS was responsible for the compromise of EchoStar’s satellite television programming security system.”
