On Monday 24 July 2006 22:22, Richard Smoot wrote:
> The problem is that The encryption used on commercial DVD's uses some
> DOD technology. As you well know, it is trivial to break it. I hope the
> Dept of defense isn't using it for something serious. The rational that
> MPAA uses is that you are also attacking National Defense. They will not
> release the code to open source OS's.
I think that's only hearsay as the Appeals Court in California did not take
that into consideration in this case from 2004, which is the latest case I
can find relating to DeCSS in the US. (Nor did any of the other seven cases I
reviewed from 1999.)
By Evan Hansen
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: February 27, 2004, 4:35 PM PST
A California appeals court on Friday reversed a 4-year-old order barring the
publication of a DVD-cracking tool on the Internet, finding the injunction
violated the defendant's free speech rights.
The case was closely watched as a test of how much protection companies can
expect in California for trade secrets that become widely distributed online.
The plaintiff, the DVD Copy Control Association, had argued that Andrew
Bunner violated its intellectual property rights by posting on the Internet
code known as DeCSS that can be used to bypass Hollywood's encryption scheme
for DVDs. Bunner's attorneys had countered that the code was no longer a
secret by the time he posted it on his Web site.
On Friday, California's Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, reversing a
trial judge's order first issued in 1999.
"The preliminary injunction...burdens more speech than necessary to protect
DVD CCA's property interest and was an unlawful prior restraint upon Bunner's
right to free speech," the three-judge panel wrote in its decision.
The decision ends the last strand of Hollywood's legal attack on DeCSS in the
United States, an effort that began when Norwegian programmer Jon Johansen
posted DeCSS on the Internet. A criminal case against Johansen in his home
country was thrown out late last year.
The ruling does not make it legal in California to post DeCSS online--an
action that has been found illegal by a federal appeals court. But the case
does mark a rare victory for free speech advocates in the United States
facing off with Hollywood over encryption technology that hampers DVD copying
and prevents discs from playing on unauthorized machines.
The motion picture industry won a key decision last week against DVD-copying
software maker 321 Studios, with a federal judge in San Jose, Calif.,
ordering the company to pull its products from stores. That decision came two
years after a federal appeals court in New York found that DeCSS violated
U.S. copyright law and upheld a lower court order prohibiting publisher 2600
from linking to the code from its Web site.
Those cases applied a federal law known as the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act (DMCA), which makes it illegal to circumvent copy-protection schemes or
traffic in circumvention tools.
By contrast, the Bunner case dealt with California state trade secrets law,
addressing technical arguments over what practices constitute trade-secret
violations and what steps companies must take to preserve their claims to
secrecy after proprietary information is made public.
Bunner attorney Allon Levy of Hopkins & Carley in San Jose, Calif., said the
decision establishes important protections for software programmers who use
legal methods to learn about proprietary products. According to Levy,
programmers had gleaned information used to create DeCSS using widely
accepted software engineering techniques known as reverse engineering. Had
the DVD CCA prevailed in the case, he said, programmers would have faced new
uncertainties over trade-secret claims asserted against legitimately created
products.
"The court found that reverse engineering is presumptively legal, something
the plaintiff had fought tooth and nail against," he said.
The DVD CCA has long argued that posting DeCSS online is illegal under
federal and California state law. But, in a surprise move earlier this year,
the group asked the court to dismiss the case.
"The DVD CCA is disappointed by and disagrees with today's decision by the
California Court of Appeals," the group said in a statement. "We are
reviewing the ruling in its entirety to determine our next steps in this
case."
--Steve Szmidt
"To enjoy the right of political self-government, men must be capable of personal self-government - the virtue of self-control. A people without decency cannot be secure in its liberty. From the Declaration Principles ----------------------------------------------------------------------- This list is provided as an unmoderated internet service by Networked Knowledge Systems (NKS). Views and opinions expressed in messages posted are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of NKS or any of its employees.
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