DVD CCA Preliminary Injunction Hearing Rescheduled

This came into my mailbox from drwiii this morning: 'The judge had a scheduling conflict this Friday, so he had to reschedule the Preliminary Injunction hearing for next Tues. PLEASE NOTE: The Preliminary Injunction Hearing is NOW set for Tuesday, January 18, 2000 at 13:30 (PST) at Santa Clara County Superior Court (Dept. 2).'

Comments

What can those of us too distant to attend do?

[FreeUser]

The subject says it all.

I and other are too far away to give any "on-site" support, but would like to help out if we can.

Aside from joining the EFF (done), what if anything can those of us too far away to attend the hearing do to help out?

Re:anyone verified this?

[deefer]

Yeah, the cynic in me growled a tad about this, as well... I think that the DVD consortium may have "informed" the judge that there would be hordes of seriously pissed off nerds congregating around the courthouse... Although nerds are not by nature violent. Vindictive, but not violent. So you have a bunch of nerds (or should it be a (Beowulf) cluster of nerds? :) with their laptops sitting outside the courthouse...
And the news of a court case being dropped recently with one of the reasons being listed as the number of hack attempts on the litigating company...
A nonviolent protest but they're all trying to outdo each other hacking? Hmmm, I don't know how good any of the protestors are... But I sure wouldn't want them poking at my servers... Worryingly, if I am correct, it just shows what side the judge is on already...
I'm not advocating any h4x0ring of anything... But I wouldn't be surprised if there was an online backlash of more than empty rhetoric...

Re:MCDOUGAL'S PHONE NUMBER IS..

[dattaway]

816 area code is a Kansas City, Missouri number. The DVD CCA is in California. Its not cool to post people's phone numbers in a public forum, especially to harass someone.

Costly for defendants to reschedule travel, etc.

[nealmcb]

This seems very rude. Hundreds of people from around the world are given a court date by a judge, and have to arrange time off, travel, etc. Then with just a week to go the judge discovers a "scheduling conflict". Does anyone know what the judge will be doing then? Or what the precedents are?

-Neal

--Neal

Re:anyone verified this?

[Effugas]

Re, the worries about "bad nerds"--

We pretty much impressed everyone there at the TRO hearing--I'm dead serious, I don't think the staff at the courthouse had ever experienced such a courteous crowd. Bruce Perens had alot to do with this, as he guided us as a mass quite effectively, but everyone there deserves credit for giving the Linux community a good name.

In comparison, the plaintiffs pretty much walked in there like they owned the place, made arguments which were essentially "Not only did these guys post the code, but they were really really mean about it and made fun of us!", and talked about the hundreds of thousands of jobs the movie industry creates. There may have been less of them, but guess which group was more civil?

Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com

Re:Costly for defendants to reschedule travel, etc

[beff]

I don't know if I would call it rude. Inconvenient, certainly. The court may have had an emergency crop up. A scheduled hearing may have run long, etc. In any event, court's tend to try to manage their schedule as to not cause injury to anybody. In this case, a delay in the hearing only serves to preserve the status quo. The fact that the court is willing to delay the hearing means to me that the court doesn't view the DVD CCA as making out a strong case of irreparable harm. Good news in my book.

Grrrr..

[slashdot-me]

Those bastards! Now I have a dilemma: Should I skip the first day of spring semester and try to convince my instructors not to drop me from the courses?

Also, I had wanted to go to the hearing because I forgot my jacket in someone's car during the TRO. Whomever gave me a ride to the Habana, do you have my dark blue jacket? Email me: ryanrs at altavista dot net.

Ryan

Re:DVD CCA case?

[Effugas]

And they do have the right to control what formats the content they produce is distributed on. "Fair use" is for quoting and limited reproduction, not redistribution of the entire body of material.

So AvantGo, which converts websites(in as much detail as you like) to a lower quality, Palmpilot-viewable form is unfair use in your book?

Hell, what about recorders? They downshift a high quality NTSC signal to a degraded--but still viewable--form for extended storage. Sony v. Universal was pretty clear that this was OK. RIAA v. Diamond even went so far as to establish the right to space shift--I have a 10GB hard drive, and with transcoding I could probably put a half dozen movies onto my 2.5inch platters. Give me a minidisc size device with a 10gb hard drive and eyeglass displays, and suddenly I can carry a small chunk of my movie library in my pocket.

Who is the movie industry to tell me that I can't do that?

Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com

Re:anyone verified this?

[vaxheadroom]

An Anonymous Coward writes: "the cynic in me wonders if the dvd group may try to arrange for no supporters to show up."

Information about the date change was distributed by the EFF's lawyer. Since the new date is right in the middle of the RSA conference being held within walking distance of the court, you can expect a substantial turnout.

Get there early for a good seat.

Re:DVD CCA case?

[Anonymous Coward]

But DeCSS was not created for conversion to different formats. It was created as an offshoot from the development to produce a DVD player for Linux.

Whatever DVDCCA's concerns about piracy (or copyright theft as I prefer to call it), the law wasn't broken. DVDCCA is saying that DVD information was distributed only to allow copyright theft, if that were the case there would be a case to answer for, they are wrong.

Fair use includes reading/playing the DVD video that you have legally purchased in anyway that you wish. At least some, and I expect most, of the defendents (I am one, hence I'm posting anonymously) have no intention of breaking copyright law. I believe that copyright law is good and proper (some details could be changed though).

Information wants to be free, meaning that information has a tendency to spread and onces its out its pretty much impossible to stop. See the theory of memes. That's why we have encryption and copyright. People have different views on this, but none of it matters to this case (IMHO).

In this case the encryption was very weak. The information avaliable is legal, it was not stolen and its not patented. Nobody that I am awear of is being prosecuted for copyright theft involoving the use of the DeCSS program.

The difference between Friday and Tuesday

[UncleRoger]

The judge had a scheduling conflict this Friday, so he had to reschedule the Preliminary Injunction hearing for next Tues.

As I recall, it was originally scheduled for a Friday Afternoon. Now it is mid-day on a Tuesday. I might have been able to bugger off early on a Friday afternoon and show up. Tuesday mid-day is right out.

How many other working stiffs (who aren't DVD CCA Lawyers) can afford to take the afternoon off to show up like that? Perhaps this was a move to lessen the number of people who show up to refute the DVD CCA's arguments?

Re:delay=more time to prepare

[Gleef]

senrik wrote:

Lets use the extra time to build an air tight case...

Unfortunately, this also means that the other side gets more time to build their case. Given the performance at the initial hearing, it looks like they need the time more than we do.

----

Probably not a good idea

[Royster]

/. posters don't seem to understand the difficulties with bit-for-bit copying of DVDs. It can't be done with consumer hardware and without CSS. A consumer DVD drive will not read all of the sectors physically present on a DVD without doing part of the CSS dance.

I've heard speculation that equipment is available to read and write these sectors without a CSS hack, but I'm still skeptical. Perhaps professional equipment exists to do this, but I don't see the need or for it to exist. If it does, it's likely custom engineered hardware that would not be available to the defense without out them building it themselves. People speculate that the firmware could be reprogrammed on consumer DVD drives to skip the CSS steps, but I've yet to see anyone claim to be able to do that. On the write side, DVD disks are mass produced, not written in drives.

Notwithstanding the cost and difficulty of obtaining the requisite hardware, demonstrating the means and ability to pirate DVDs is not really where this case needs to go.

The demo which is needed is to show a non-infringing use such as playing a legally purchased DVD on a laptop running Linux.

Re:Probably not a good idea

[Royster]

If we can't show that pirating doesn't rely on DeCSS (or other use of the encryption algorithm), then we've got an uphill battle.

I don't think so. The landmark VCR case (sorry I don't have a link or even a proper reference to it) seems to say that any non-infringing use means that it can't be banned. We need to demonstrate a non-infringing use much more than demonstrate alternative pirating schemes.

The weakest part of the case is that it all depends on trade secrets. It's a real stretch to infer that the writers of CSS had any kind of a duty to maintain the trade secret as it can not be shown that they were ever contractually required to maintain the secret. Once it fails to be kept a secret, all protection is lost. The DVD CCA would have to show that each and every one of the 500 defendants either knew or should have known that the material was a protected trade secret -- a nearly impossible task --especially considering the substancial doubt surrounding that claim in the case of the writers of CCS.

Their failure to receive a preliminary ruling should be a big clue to them of the fundamental weakness of their case. A preliminary ruling is fairly easy to get. You need to show a prima facie case and substancial harm in the lack of a ruling. The temporary nature of a TRO tends to lessen the burden of proof to the plaintiff. They had no problem showing potential harm, but the judge obviously felt that their claim was something of a stretch in the first place.

Covered on CNN again

[Snags]

CNN Headline News just had a blurb (6:25PM ET 1/11) covering "DVD pirating". They displayed
one of the Linux DVD pages while talking about pirating and deCSS. I'd think that page-owner has a good libel (slander?) case against CNN for defamation of character. Heck, at the time, Linux DVD was the only thing readable on the screen, so the whole Linux name is degraded. They'll probably loop around and show it again at 6:55PM ET. Maybe they'll put up the transcript on their webpage.

main(O){10<putchar((O--,102-((O&4)*16| (31&60>>5*(O&3)))))&&main(2+O);}

DeCSS listed on NoNags

[Kris_J]

This is just a quick note to say that the DeCSS utility is listed in the NoNags software archive (in the Multimedia section) - automatically mirrored on hundreds of servers around the world. I tripped over it the other day. I don't know if this info helps. (For all I know they were listed as one of the sites in the original nasty-gram.)

Damn Good Arguments

[Royster]

Thanks for the link. The various documents posted on the parent site provide what appears to be an air-tight defense. The EFF lawyers have done an marvelous job with this.

CSS is dead.