Legal battles in secret world of set-top boxes

Before a phone-hacking scandal forced Rupert Murdoch to close the News of the World or his News America Marketing division was accused of hacking into computers at Floorgraphics, a US rival, another News Corp offshoot faced allegations that it had hacked into competitors’ security systems, costing them more than $2 billion.

Lawsuits since 2002 from several pay-TV groups claimed that NDS, a digital technology company that was at the time about 80 per cent owned by News Corp, cracked the codes of rivals’ smartcards that are used to secure pay-TV set-top boxes, then released them to pirates, who flooded the market with counterfeit cards. The lawsuits were filed by Canal Plus Technologies, a division of the French pay-TV operator Canal Plus, Echostar and DirecTV in the US and Sogecable, the Spanish pay-TV company.