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Weirdly enough, this is only true for Americans. Foreigners are automatically granted copyright protection without registering under the Berne Convention. American authors still have to register in order to sue someone so that we maintain full employment at the the US Copyright Office.

Also, I think the Berne Convention lets you bid no-trump if you hold three aces, but I have to check my notes.

What would you recommend for further reading on the subject? Any particular web sites on the subject? Books? Have you considered writing an essay on the subject?

I meant to provide a refference or two, but accidentally got carried away and wrote a huge essay :D

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It's hard to think of really good refferences. I've been picking it up piecemeal from many sources, often on side reading prompted by slashdot stories. I've been reading several sections of the US copyright law itself.

The most important part is chapter 1, with section 106 defining exactly what protections copyright grants, and other sections placing all sorts of limitations on copyright protection.

Chapter 10 subchapter B is the main part of the Audio Home Recording Act. It mandated that digital audio devices MUST contain DRM known as the Serial Copy Management System. This is why the perfectly good technology of Digital Audio Tape (DAT) completely died. This law killed it. No one wants to buy a crippled product. They are currently trying to mandate DRM technology for the new high definition digital TV rollout. If they do mandate DRM in it I predict it will kill this technology as well. They may mandate a 'broadcast flag' that restricts the taping of programming, and all hardware must enforce the restriction.

Chapter 5 section 506(a) is the new NET act - No Electronic Theft. One of the only CRIMINAL LAW parts under the copyright title. If this law were actually enforced the US prison population would go up more than TENFOLD. Almost everyone who has ever used a P2P filesharing program could go to prison for up to 5 years.

The only other criminal law I know of under the copyright title is the chapter 12, which has the main part of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. This doesn't actually protect copyright - it protects DRM systems. 1201 makes it a crime to descramble encryption or to tell anyone else how to descramble encryption. 1202 makes it a crime to modify a file you own. 1204 states the penalty for 1201 and 1202 is up to 5 years in prison and half-million dollar fine, 10 years and a million dollar fine on a second offence. The people who wrote the law were supposedly outlawing "piracy tools", but they were actually outlawing "fair-use tools". They also don't know squat about computers. When they say 'tools' they think programs, but a program is just an embodyment of knowledge and thinking. You can illegally traffic in these tools by talking to another programmer in plain english, and you can use these tools just by thinking.

I also came across several court rulings relating to reverse engineering programs - Sega vs. Accolade and Atari vs Nintendo. This has a good overview of the two cases, but actually reading the judge's rulings is even more informative. One interesting point is that you can't hijack copyright protection or trademark protection to lock out competitors. Game console makers make most of their money by licencing people to make games for the system, so they try to lock out independant programmers. In one case it was ruled that a game can put up a false copyright/trademark notice if that is the only way the console will boot the game. Another case said you can include a copyrighted image/section if that is the only way to get the console to boot the game.

The reasoning is this - there are aspects of programs that are protected by copyright, and aspects that arent. Copyright does not protect ideas. This means you can reverse engineer a program to extract the ideas embodied in the program, and you can use those same ideas as long as you write your own code. An issue is that two programs that do the same thing tend to look alike. To avoid charges of copying sometimes a "clean room" situation is used where one programmer reads the code to extract the ideas and specifications and gives the documentation to another programmer. The second pr

Actually, that's not the case. The applicable case is Feist vs Rural Telephone, where the Supremes ruled that copyright protection required creativity and facts are only discovered, that "sweat of the brow" (in assembling a compilation of facts) doesn't confer copyright protection, and thus simple collections of facts such as a phonebook aren't copyrightable.

See this page for more info.

fatwallet is in the right, but unfortunately they don't have the resources to fight this.

and the Windows lawsuit (which they settled with Microsoft out of court as an undisclosed sum, at the same time the $120m non-voting stock/IE default/Office port things happened) is why.

Wrong. Two separate things.

The infamous 'look-and-feel' lawsuit was filed in 1988 and lasted until 1993. Apple lost the case, and their defeat was ultimately upheld after several appeals. They were willing to take it all the way, but the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

In 1997, Apple had compiled quite a large list of lawsuit-worthy beefs with Microsoft, most if not all of which centered around Microsoft's infringement of some Apple patents. In return for Apple not suing (because apparently Gates was convinced Apple would've had a pretty good case this time), Microsoft agreed to the $150M worth of non-voting stock investment/public vote of confidence, and five years of continued development of Office on the Mac.

~Philly

It's widely available. Here, for example. Other jurisdictionshave adopted it as a model.

See comments at the end of FEDERAL APPEALS COURT HOLDS SHRINK WRAP LICENSE UNENFORCEABLE on this topic, written by someone who doesn't have to add "IANAL". :-)

Apple sued Microsoft, unsuccessfully, in the late 1980s for Microsoft's alleged copying of its look and feel. We are lucky this lawsuit failed, otherwise the legal ground for lawsuits against KDE and GNOME for 'copying' Windows and Mac look and feel. The Apple/Microsoft lawsuit was mentioned in the GNU newsletter in 1988

Lotus did something similar, suing companies who copied the command structure of its 1-2-3 spreadsheet. Microsoft, for all its faults, has never pursued look and feel lawsuits.

The Apple and Lotus cases are summarised here - interestingly, Microsoft licensed the Macintosh user interface in 1985, and Apple still sued them.

You're wrong. Plain and simple.

1. Trade secrets are protectable in the U.S. at the state level only; you can't seek trade secret protection at the federal level.

2. To prove misappropriation of trade secrets in the U.S., the plaintiff has to show that the secrets were either stolen or were disclosed under contract (a NDA, Non-Disclosure Agreement) which has now been violated. Either way, the defendent would have had to have access to the trade secrets in question; misappropriation can mean this was done either by stealing them or that they were voluntarily disclosed under NDA and were released in violation of contract.

3. Trade secret misappropriation is not necessarily a criminal offense. In some states, the plaintiff can seek criminal charges; in most states, the defendent can only be sued. (Which is most likely why the DVD CCA case was argued in California State Court)

4. Once a trade secret has been released, it no longer has protection under U.S. trade secret law. The plaintiff can sue all they want, and even win and seek damages. But it is no longer a trade secret.

Truth is..

1. The individual who "misappropriated" the CSS algorithm did not have access to the algorithm; it was obtained via reverse engineering. It would seem that no NDA was signed, no contract was breached. This is why the DVD CCA in California made it a theft case rather than a misappropriation one.

2. The "theft" took place in Norway, whose laws explicitly allow reverse engineering. Since trade secrets in the U.S. are only protectable at the state level, you can't seek international jurisdiction for trade secret protection. This is most likely why the battle got shifted so quickly to the federal level and the DMCA. Copyright infringement is prosecutable as a federal crime.

I know that the facts tend to take the wind out of a well-reasoned emotional tirade.

Honestly, the only way trade secret misappropriation can be shown is by using the argument that the EULA on the Xing player was both agreed to and violated in a jurisdiction where this constitutes an offense. This is far from certain, with lots of holes.

The DVD CCA case is extremely weak; the EFF knows it and the CCA knows it. Trade secret protection isn't enough here. This is why the MPAA (essentially the same folks as the CCA) are filing charges under the DMCA in federal court.

For more info on trade secret protection in the United States:

http://www.lawguru.com/faq/17.html

http://www.lgu.com/ts46.htm

From the posted items, it appears the infringement claims may be based on either copyright or patents or both, and that the jurisdiction may be European. As I'm also not a lawyer, the following information may be highly irrelevant, though I hope it's illuminating.

First, it's not clear that there are legal grounds to pull the plug an an entire website based on alleged but not (at least publicly) specified infringemnt. If nothing else, ISPs may face significant backlash risks for violating common carrier covenants to provide equal service to all without prejudice. My reading of the US DMCA (Millenium Copyright Act) is that protection against copyright infringment on the part of customers is offered in return for a clarification of common-carrier status, and liability limitations. This is US law and doesn't apply in the UK, but a similar legal tradition exists there.

Second, there is precedent under US law of a similar type of reverse engineering in the case of either Sega v. Accolade or Atari v. Nintendo (I don't recall which, and it may have been another, but these are the two major cases in the area, and the subject was gaming). The basic premise was that the defendant's hardware require both reverse engineering of software to allow cartridges to run on it, and a literal copying of some small portion (14 bytes?) of code was required by the security or authentication mechanism of the console, including, IIRC, an encoded trademark. These were held to have functional, not expressive, attributes, and the defendents won in both cases.

I suspect a bit of bluster here, and while I wouldn't run for shelter in the information I've provided, I might look to it for some ideas for defense.

> "The Fable of the Keys" was published in the _Journal of Law and
> Economics_ in 1990, years before Microsoft's trouble with the DOJ.
> I don't believe that the Independence Institute had anything to do with it.

Yes, yes. I did not even imply such. The "Independent Institute" is a mouthpiece for whatever corporate organ chooses to pay their way. However, you may want to review your history. While the article in question does predate the DOJ investigation, it most certainly does not predate the FTC inquiry into Microsoft's business practices. For example: http://www.lgu.com/an50.htm. Even though the date there is given as 1990, the FTC had been gathering complaints for a couple of years prior to that.

> Regardless, the article's point has not been refuted: The paradigm
> example of market-failure due to network effects rests on shoddy evidence.

Happily, that remains just your opinion. It doesn't seem any amount of evidence would convince you otherwise.

In the late 80's Atari made a number of carts under the tengen name. NOA took them to court on the basis that in order to play on their system (the NESat that time) the carts had to validate via some secret code and that code was copyright or patented by Nintendo. The court upheld and Atari was on the slippery slope to hell.

Not quite correct.

In order to run on the Nintendo platform, you need to have some code that identifies the cartridge as "Nintendo-approved." Atari chose a rather nefarious way of discovering this code sequence: They wrote to the US Copyright office, claimed they were in litigation with Nintendo and, as part of their discovery process, requested a copy of the "code in dispute". The copyright office sent them a listing of Nintendo's authentication code. Atari incorporated into their cart and published it.

Nintendo sues, claiming infringement of "intellectual property" rights. The court ruled against Atari. However, the court went to great lengths to state that its decision was based on Atari's fraudulent behavior, not because of reverse-engineering. Indeed, the court went on to explain that reverse engineering is fair use. This decision is outlined here.

There is also another detailed paper on the subject of reverse engineering, and "lock-out" processes in particular. I haven't read through it completely yet, but it does point out that many of the questions surrounding the legitimacy of reverse-engineering remain unanswered by the courts.

In short, Nintendo is throwing its weight around, trying to bully people into submission. I wouldn't buy into it. A polite note should also be sent to the ISP in question, informing them that Nintendo's legal claims are dubious, at best.

Schwab