The BBC’s flagship current affairs programme Panorama has claimed that NDS was responsible for bringing down the conditional access system used by ITV Digital.
The claims were the subject of a 2002 case brought by Canal Plus in the US District Court in San Jose.
Panorama interviewed self-confessed hacker Lee Gibling who had run a piracy website known as The House of Ill Compute (Thoic). Gibling claims he was seconded to a joint Sky-NDS anti piracy operation. Codes for ITV Digital (originally known as On Digital) were regularly released on the internet.
The operation was later closed down after fellow pirates discovered that Gibling’s work was not all his own.
In a statement NDS said it never used or sought to use the “Thoic” website for any illegal purpose. “NDS paid Lee Gibling for his expertise so information from “Thoic” could be used to track and catch hackers and pirates”.
Interviewed for the programme, former ITV Digital CTO Simon Dore said piracy had been a major factor in the terrestrial pay operation’s collapse. “The business had its issues aside from piracy, no question, but those issues would have been solvable. The real killer was the piracy we couldn’t recover from that.”
But NDS refuted the allegations: “It is simply not true that NDS used the Thoic website to sabotage the commercial interests of On Digital/ITV Digital or indeed any rival. The United States Department of Justice, a federal court jury, a federal trial court, and a federal appellate court have all rejected allegations that NDS was responsible for TV piracy or that NDS distributed codes that facilitated that piracy.”
Oliver Kömmerling, who was also featured in the programme, told Broadband TV News that the relevance of the website had been overblown by Panorama. He said that Gibling’s role in the operation had been understated.
The 2002 case was never concluded. Vivendi chose to break-up Canal Plus Technologies, and News Corp acquired the MediaHighway middleware business, while the CA division went to Kudelski.
Last week NDS received €14.4 million as payment of the separate and long running EchoStar-Dish hacking case.
The company is due to be sold to Cisco, subject to regulatory clearance.
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