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.

Links