Kudelski’s sister company Nagravision has been awarded a final default judgment worth $101 million by the US District Court for the Southern District of Texas in a lawsuit against China’s Zhuhai Gotech Intelligent Technology Co. Ltd. and two related companies.
Nagra filed the case alleging Gotech’s technologies and services were primarily designed and intended to circumvent content protection technologies. Kudelski Security and Nagra Content Protection Services carried out the identification and forensic investigation of the defendants and their alleged pirate activities.
In the wide-ranging lawsuit, Nagra argued that Zhuhai Gotech Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd., Gotech International Technology Ltd., and Globalsat International Technology Ltd. manufactured and distributed unauthorised set-top boxes under brand names including Globalsat, AZAmerica, NAZABox, Captiveworks and Lamest.
Furthermore, they operated Internet Key Sharing (IKS) servers from servers located in the US, thereby violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), as well as the Federal Communications Act (FCA).
Commenting on the development, Maurice van Riek, senior VP, head of content and asset security for Nagra, said: “We have demonstrated in our security labs that Gotech has impacted every major conditional access system (CAS) and is also providing an illegal content sharing solution, impacting pay-TV operators everywhere.
“We appreciate that the damage caused by the wrongdoing of Gotech has been recognised by the judge and that the court has ordered Gotech to stop harming our industry with their products and practices.”
Frederic Guitard, VP media security services for Kudelski Security, added: The pleasure that billions of people around the world get from television every day is dependent on the ability of the legitimate value chain to capture fair value for its hard work.
“When pirates illegally divert the flow of money away from legitimate content creators and distributors, the whole industry and ultimately the end consumer will suffer. That’s why it’s our mission to identify and manage piracy on behalf of our customers, even as it continues to evolve and morph on a daily basis.”
In addition to ordering the damage payment, United States District Judge Kenneth M. Hoyt also enjoined Gotech from manufacturing and selling any equipment or offering any services that could be used for piracy, as well as ordering Gotech to turn over any existing equipment or software that could be used to commit piracy.
In addition, the judge ordered third parties providing services that enable Gotech’s alleged piracy to stop doing so, and ordered the ownership of Gotech’s primary website domain to be transferred to Nagra.
In a related move, organisers of the IBC Exhibition in Amsterdam this week have banned Gotech from exhibiting this year.
Kudelski Security estimates that there were more than three million end users connected to various Gotech servers.
