‘Reconfiguration’ DirecTV Access Card is not ‘modification’

The Federal Communications Act (“the Act”) prohibits the production of satellite piracy devices:

Any person who manufactures, assembles, modifies, imports, exports, sells, or distributes any electronic, mechanical, or other device or equipment, knowing or having reason to know that the device or equipment is primarily of assistance in the unauthorized decryption of satellite cable programming

Fines can reach a quite staggering $500,000 – but that won’t matter so much because you’ll be in Jail for five years, so at least you won’t have to worry about being short on money for your groceries.

In a recent lower court ruling – subsequently backed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals – it was determined that the use of a device called an ‘unlooper’ to active hacked DirecTV decryption card) does no constitute ‘modification’ or ‘assembly’ under the context of the Act.

There are, apparently, very sound reasons to restrict the law to those cases where individuals have manufactured and sold devices solely for the purposes of satellite piracy. Amongst these reasons are the rather wonderful – and very wide ranging – scope of ‘research’.

Researchers, Jason Schultz of the Electronic Frontier says,

who assemble and modify these devices for purposes of educational research and innovation studies … will no longer have to worry about potential liability from vendors who don’t like their results

A win for the pirates? A small one, for sure. We’re more interested in the research possibilities offered by the RIAA’s material currently residing on a number of P2P music filesharing networks…

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