DirecTV has been waging a war on piracy that makes the record labels look nonchalant. The company has filed about 10,000 lawsuits and mailed more than 100,000 "demand letters" giving suspected pirates a brutal choice: Pay $3,500 to settle or go to court. Problem is, the campaign targets anyone who bought smartcard programming gear from certain merchants; officials just assume it's used for hacking. Is that fair? DirecTV enforcement chief Larry Rissler thinks so. - Lucas Graves
WIRED: Those $3,500 settlement checks must be generating a nice little revenue stream. Has it put a dent in DirecTV's losses due to piracy?
RISSLER: We've never quantified the number who are stealing or quantified the losses. We do view it as a serious problem, and we're taking serious measures to address it.
How successful have you been?
By the number of Web sites we've taken down, the number of law enforcement actions we've taken, and the number of people who've been contacted by our end-user development group, it makes sense to say we've had an impact.
Your letters don't distinguish between pirates and people who program smartcards for legitimate reasons, like security systems. Why not?
If an individual claims to have a legitimate use, he or she can furnish information - a business plan, maybe schematics - and our staff will evaluate it. In at least 20 cases, DirecTV chose not to pursue the matter after the individual provided background.
You're putting the burden of proof on the accused.
There's a legal presumption that the purchase of the device implies use, and the burden switches to the defendant to show that it was used in a legitimate manner. We're talking about products that came into existence because of the satellite piracy industry.
But a lot of the equipment itself is perfectly legal.
That's correct. We also look at the Web sites these things are sold on. We're not going after people who purchased devices from Hewlett-Packard's site. We're going after people who purchased devices from pirate sites like White Viper. Anyone who looks at these sites would see the red flags.
What about the innocents who wanted to steal but were too dumb to make it work?
If they can convince a jury that was the case, then they prevail.
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