DirecTV Charged With Racketeering For Forcing Innocent Techies To Pay
from the fight-back dept
A few months ago we had the story of how DirecTV was harassing innocent techies who happened to buy smart card readers. Clearly, many of the people who buy those readers were using them for illegal purposes (such as pirating signals), but there are legitimate uses for them as well. DirecTV was of the opinion that if you bought such a smartcard reader you were guilty by association - and got their hands on some customer lists of some websites that had been selling those readers. They then sent threatening legal letters to all those customers, telling them to pay $3,500 or face legal consequences. Many of the accused techies fought back and a confused judge ruled against them and even made them pay DirecTV's legal fees. Now, however, those techies are fighting back again, and are accusing DirecTV of violating racketeering laws normally used to put organized criminals in jail. They claim that DirecTV was basically using extortion (and fraud) to force them to pay $3,500 or face a costly lawsuit. DirecTV points to the earlier lawsuit and say they expect this one will turn out the same way.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
No Subject Given
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: No Subject Given
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
May I ask your zipcode please ?
And people wonder why I'm concerned about privacy ?
Might a suggest a click away to www.nocards.org for those that want to learn how to begin to protect your 4th Amendment ?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: May I ask your zipcode please ?
And some people wonder why I'm concerned about spam.
Might I suggest a click away to one of a variety of sites for those specifically provided to those who want to rant about...well, whatever they want to rant about
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: May I ask your zipcode please ?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]