Intellectual Property Law

For those interested in the News Corp/NDS industrial espionage ruckus, there’s a great write-up over at afr.com. It will get you up to speed pretty quickly.

For those who don’t know, NDS has been accused by several pay TV companies of hiring hackers to break other companies’ satellite encryption schemes and then posting the trade secrets on the internet allowing opportunists to manufacture counterfeit smart cards that give free access to programming which would typically require payment (like DirecTV and Echostar).

We’ll pay closer attention to this because Echostar’s case against NDS, set to go to trial in April of this year in California District Court, is considered one of the largest industrial espionage cases ever heard in the U.S.