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By Mavis Scanlon
O.J. Simpson is probably the highest-profile individual to be charged with stealing a satellite signal. But that headline-making case-DirecTV sued Simpson in early March, claiming $20,000 in damages-was a drop in the bucket compared with the 22,000 other people DirecTV sued earlier this year as part of a stepped-up campaign to contain satellite piracy.
DirecTV is losing as much as $1 billion a year to piracy, far more than rival EchoStar, according to the Carmel Group. Estimates from the research firm outline the magnitude of the problem: As many as 2.2 million people were stealing DirecTV's signal in 2003 with pirated access cards, compared to about 720,000 for EchoStar.
DirecTV's efforts to combat what some say is an unstoppable problem has raised the ire of civil liberties advocates, who say the company, now owned by News Corp., has gone too far. A lawsuit filed in mid-March in federal court accuses DirecTV of using scare tactics to intimidate people into anteing up $3,500 to settle.or go to trial. After obtaining sales records seized from companies selling so-called "smart cards," DirecTV sent out over 100,000 letters to the purchasers of the cards; the lawsuits followed. Courts in Georgia and South Carolina threw out several DirecTV suits last year because the company could not prove that defendants owned both the smart cards and satellite equipment.
Overseas, DirecTV's new parent is having more success fighting pirates. News Corp. chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch recently touted the progress the company has made with its programming encryption, or conditional-access systems, at Sky Italia. DirecTV last month renewed its conditional-access agreement with News Corp.-owned NDS, just months after the two companies settled their own bitter legal dispute.
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