Secret unit within News Corp promoted a wave of tech piracy in Australia

Allegations of similar behaviour in the UK as well: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17494723

I wonder whether we need a different presumption of executive responsibility in these cases. Plausible deniability seems way too weak a defense to permit, since it allows executives to set up a culture and incentives to encourage wrongdoing and yet walk away from the consequences if they weren't directly informed of the specific actions taken.

In a away it's analogous to the 'it wasn't me, it was the algorithm' defense - 'it wasn't me, it was my employees'.

This doesn't mean that executives should necessarily be held personally liable for the damages caused by their companies, but if they persistently can't keep their organizations operating within the law, perhaps a period of open public administration at the company's expense might be a good remedy.

[note: there might be some serious drawbacks to this proposal - it's just a conjecture since corporate wrongdoing is a serious problem that doesn't seem to have good solutions yet]

There was a big case about this between echostar and NDS in the US, and canalplus in France as well, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NDS_Group (although there seems to be a minor edit war going on on that article, so look at the history).

I remember when people were burning the cards for On-Digital in the UK. The new codes would apparently be uploaded within only a few minutes of being switched over, so it was obvious at the time that it was either someone from within On-Digital, or someone with extremely good resources.