A 19 year-old student has been charged with stealing details of satellite television smart cards and posting them on the internet.

Los Angeles resident Igor Serebryany was hired to scan technical papers needed by satellite TV provider DirecTV as part of a lawsuit.

But prosecutors claim that he sent hundreds of digital documents to three satellite pirate websites.

According to The New York Times, this could help pirates develop hacks for DirecTV's smart cards.

Federal prosecutors explained that Serebryany would be charged under the rarely used 1996 Economic Espionage Act and faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The documents contained technical specifications for DirecTV's Period 4 generation of satellite smart cards.

The technical details were valuable because the three previous generations of DirecTV access cards have already been hacked by pirates, costing the company a fortune in lost revenues.

The company has 11 million paying subscribers in the US, but industry analysts estimate that an additional million or more households illegally receive DirecTV signals.