The $58,000 TV bill: When DirecTV sued O.J. Simpson for piracy

Eventually, though, he headed back out into the storm. After trying to seize some sports memorabilia in Las Vegas he said had been stolen from him, Simpson was charged with robbery, kidnapping, and assault (2007), leading to his conviction (2008) and then a Nevada prison term that ran until his eventual parole (2017). He died of cancer in 2024. I knew the basic parameters of Simpson’s life from national news stories over the years, of course. But not until this month did I stumble across a Simpson controversy I hadn’t known about: He was an accused satellite TV pirate who had been sued in federal court, much like the various music file-sharing defendants I covered so often during the 2000s. The difference was that in Simpson’s case, his whole home had been searched by the feds—and with the help of the private company that would later sue him civilly. The raid itself took place during that interlude of relative calm when Simpson lived on 112th Street in Miami. On December 4, 2001, Simpson’s home was one of 13 locations searched by the FBI after a two-year drugs-and-pirate-TV investigation. According to the LA Times, Simpson “was in a white bathrobe when he greeted officers” and “was not arrested” during the search. No drugs were found, but Simpson’s home address had also come up during the investigation as one potentially linked to the purchase of satellite TV pirating equipment. So when law enforcement descended on his place, they didn’t do so alone. They brought with them James Whalen, then a senior director for DirecTV’s Office of Signal Integrity. Whalen was there, he said later, because he was “asked by the FBI to accompany law enforcement” so that he could “assist in the identification of counterfeit or illegal materials associated with the theft of telecommunications services.” For these descramblers to work, they each needed an access card—a smartcard that told the descrambler which channels to unlock. Enterprising pirates had found ways to produce their own access cards. These could give access to certain channel sets, so long as one didn’t plug the descrambler’s modem into the phone jack. (This could alert DirecTV that an unauthorized unit was in place at a location with no subscription.) But even if you kept the descramblers from phoning home, DirecTV had a way of crippling illicit access cards. It could electronically “knock them out” using electronic countermeasures (ECM). These were bits of code embedded into the main, over-the-air satellite feeds and executed automatically by the receiver/descrambler hardware. The code would typically write data to illicit access cards in such a way that the cards failed security checks and became useless for piracy. Days before the 2001 Super Bowl, DirecTV rolled out an extremely powerful ECM. It was so successful that January 21, 2001, was known in the pirate community as “Black Sunday.” Huge numbers of illicit access cards were knocked out. A Slashdot story from the time cataloged the damage: One week before the Super Bowl, DirecTV launched a series of attacks against the hackers of their product. DirecTV sent programmatic code in the stream… that hunted down hacked smart cards and destroyed them. The IRC DirecTV channels overflowed with thousands of people who had lost the ability to watch their stolen TV. The hacking community by and large lost not only their ability to watch TV, but the cards themselves were likely permanently destroyed. Some estimate that in one evening, 100,000 smart cards were destroyed, removing 98 percent of the hacking communities’ ability to steal their signal. To add a little pizzazz to the operation, DirecTV personally “signed” the anti-hacker attack. The first eight computer bytes of all hacked cards were rewritten to read “GAME OVER.” Years later, Wired tracked down the man who had helped develop the Black Sunday ECM. He designed the code to be sneaky so that pirates wouldn’t know what was about to hit them until it was too late. “Instead of being delivered all at once like other measures,” the story noted, “the Black Sunday attack code was sent to pirate cards in about five dozen parts over the course of two months, like a tank transported piece by piece to a battlefield to be assembled in the field.” But pirates are crafty folk. To bring their “dead” access cards back to life, they invented bootloaders, small hardware devices that could sit between the descrambler hardware and the access card. A bootloader worked electrical magic that would allow a “killed” access card to function after all. In his walkthrough of Simpson’s home, Whalen said that he “personally observed two (2) bootloaders in operation.” The bootloaders were plugged into the two DirecTV descramblers, and Whalen “personally checked the channels being received by the respective televisions,” he said in an affidavit, “and was able to view DirecTV pay-per-view programming and other channels which Simpson was not authorized to receive.” Whalen then handed the bootloaders over to FBI agents. The bootloaders themselves are curious pieces of technology, and DirecTV hired electronics experts to figure out how they worked. In Simpson’s case, the company filed an affidavit from engineer David Simon, who described a device known as the “Atomic Bootloader.” Microchips rely on clock pulses to keep everything in the circuit in sync. The bootloader’s Atmel microcontroller had one job: It brought several resistors into the circuit 522 clock cycles into the smart card’s boot cycle. When this happened, voltage flowing from the descrambler to the smartcard dropped from 5 volts to 2.1 volts for 500 nanoseconds before returning to standard. Given the massive expense of investigations and lawsuits, the value of such campaigns was often said to lie in the deterrent effects they might provide. But huge waves of negative publicity were also a common result as content industries engaged in legal overreach, targeted neutral technologies, or sued the inevitable innocent granny. DirecTV was already facing this sort of bad publicity by 2003, when it was under heavy criticism from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). According to the EFF, “DirecTV made little effort to distinguish legal uses of smart card technology from illegal ones,” so the EFF “received hundreds of calls and emails from panicked device purchasers.” Some of these “panicked device purchasers” paid up but later regretted it. Together, they filed a federal class action claim against DirecTV, saying it had violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (“RICO”) by mailing demand letters even though the company had no idea what people were doing with the smartcards or bootloaders they had purchased. The demand letters generally said that no lawsuit would be filed so long as the recipient agreed to: (1) surrender all illegally modified Access Cards or other satellite signal theft devices in your possession, custody or control; (2) execute a written statement to the effect that you will not purchase or use illegal signal theft devices to obtain satellite programming in the future, nor will you have any involvement in the unauthorized reception and use of DIRECTV’s satellite television programming; and (3) pay a monetary sum to DIRECTV for your past wrongful conduct and the damages thereby incurred by the company. The RICO case went all the way to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which eventually ruled that DirecTV was within its rights to send such letters and that they were not mail fraud. But other court cases cut into DirecTV’s legal strategy. One of the most important was a case against an individual named Mike Treworgy, who had purchased a “PT2 Pocket Pal Programmer” and a “PT2 Pocket Pal Upgrade Chip” that could have been used to help Treworgy get free DirecTV. As with most of these campaigns against individuals, this one too ended not with a bang but a whimper. After the judge ruled against Simpson, the only remaining issue was how much he would owe in damages. DirecTV had requested $20,000 under each of two separate laws, for a total of $40,000. The judge noted that Simpson had not “used the devices commercially or for resale,” so she declined to award the full request. Instead, DirecTV got $15,000 in damages under the first statute and $10,000 under the second, for a total of $25,000. The higher cost, though, came from legal fees. DirecTV submitted a motion for Simpson to pay its lawyers after his loss, and the judge agreed to a $33,678 legal bill. The court granted final judgment on November 29, 2005, ruling that “the Juice” owed DirecTV a grand total of $58,678. It was pricey, yes—but in a way, Simpson got off cheap. When the recording industry launched its own mass lawsuit campaign, college students and single moms were eventually hit with $675,000 or even $1.92 million verdicts. With that final judgment, another in the long string of court cases that defined Simpson’s later years came to an end. Simpson soon had bigger problems than TV piracy, though; two years later, in September 2007, he and some men with guns burst into a hotel room at the Palace Station in Las Vegas and, in just six minutes, committed the acts that finally put him in prison. Being branded a satellite TV pirate is not going to define O.J.’s legacy, of course. At best, the story is a minor footnote. But it remains a fascinating example of what happens when an anti-piracy, mass-lawsuit campaign sweeps up a celebrity like “the Juice”—and squeezes him for $58,678.