A Florida Federal Court walloped a DISH Network pirate with a $51 million judgment after he was found to be posting software on the internet that allowed people with Free-to-air (FTA) satellite systems to receive programming from DISH Network without paying for it.

Satellite companies like DISH go to great lengths to protect their signals with various types of encryption, but when someone figures out how to crack the code and receive programming for free, they sometimes share it with others who also end up risking prosecution if they are caught pirating a subscription channel.

The court held that the posting of pirating software code is a violation of the Federal Communications Act, and that statutory damages should be arrived at based on how many persons downloaded the pirating software. Considering the $51 million number, one heck of a lot of people must have downloaded that code!

These matters are taken very seriously and as one pirate who was foolish enough to advertise his illegal wares found out, $51 million is a pretty big number. Can’t imagine how the average Joe could pay that, but I sure wouldn’t want to have to figure out how!

I had wondered what kind of useful features DISH Network might be introducing when they announced a while back that we could not connect our DVRs to the internet. Due to the amount of work involved, I put it of for quite a while, but I finally got around to getting it connected via my home network a couple of months ago.

The big benefit I noticed right off the bat was that I had access to a lot more on demand content. Some of it was from channels I did not even subscribe to, so that was kind of cool. All you need to do is select one of the on-demand programs from the list and it will be downloaded via the internet for you to watch.

A while later I discovered another nice advantage to having my DVR connected to the internet. I could access and control my DVR from anywhere I could access the internet. I can sit in my office and browse the program guide on my PC and set up programs to be recorded while my wife is sitting in the living room watching TV.

Check out the story of how I managed to save the day by borrowing my son’s iPhone to access my DVR while riding in the car on the way back home one night after I realized I had forgotten to set the DVR to record something. Now that was cool.