Advanced Copyright Law on the Internet

SCEA was therefore entitled to a preliminary injunction against sale of the device under Section

1203.^841

(ii) The DirecTV Cases

a. DirecTV, Inc. v. Borow

This straightforward case found defendant Randy Borow in violation of Section
1201(a)(1) for using an emulator to circumvent DirecTV’s encryption on its signals and to
simulate certain functions of the DirecTV access card in order to watch DirecTV’s programming
without paying subscription fees.^842

b. DirecTV, Inc. v. Carrillo

In this case, the court found the defendant liable under Section 1201 based on his
possession and transfer of equipment used to pirate satellite TV signals. The court found that the
devices were primarily designed to intercept encrypted signals.^843

(iii) Sony Computer Entertainment America v. Divineo

In Sony Computer Entertainment America, Inc. v. Divineo,^844 the court granted summary
judgment to the plaintiff that several devices sold by the defendant violated the anti-
circumvention provisions of the DMCA. The devices all could be used to circumvent an
authentication process designed by Sony into the Playstation system to verify that an inserted
disc was authentic before the Playstation would play it. If a user burned a copy of a copyrighted
Playstation game, a unique code that was part of every authentic disc would not be copied, thus
preventing the user from playing the copy on the Playstation. The defendant sold the following
devices that could be used to circumvent this process: (i) HDLoader, software that permitted a
user to make an unauthorized copy of Playstation-compatible video games onto a separate hard
drive connected to the Playstation system; (ii) mod chips that, when wired to a Playstation
console, circumvented the authentication system and allowed the system to play the unauthorized
software; and (iii) devices that allowed a user to boot up a Playstation console and perform a disc
swap without triggering the software and hardware mechanisms within the Playstation that
initiated the authentication system.^845

The defendant argued against liability on the ground that there were several ways in
which the devices could be used that did not result in infringement of the plaintiff’s copyrighted
video games. First, the devices could be used to allow more than 150 items of “homemade”

(^841) Id. at 987-88. A similar case finding a violation of the DMCA as a result of sales of a cable descrambler and
decoder is CSC Holdings, Inc. v. Greenleaf Electronics, Inc., 2000 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 7675 (N.D. Ill. 2000).
(^842) DirecTV, Inc. v. Borow, 2005 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 1328 at *3, 12-13 (N.D. Ill. Jan. 6, 2005).
(^843) DirecTV, Inc. v. Carrillo, 227 Fed. Appx. 588, 589-90 (9th Cir. 2007).
(^844) 457 F. Supp. 2d 957 (N.D. Cal. 2006).
(^845) Id. at 958-59.