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CyberPatrol Update - Mattel Wins?
Slak writes "According to ZDNet, Eddy L.O. Jansson of Sweden and Matthew Skala of Canada have settled with Microsystems when they "agreed Monday to abide by permanent injunctions preventing them from distributing their software, which allows users to bypass the filters. They also agreed to turn over rights to their software to Microsystems." The ACLU lawyer was shocked. I'm shocked. Why would they settle? As I understood things, there were serious questions of jurisdiction. If I were the conspiracy sort, my mind would be racing. "
Can somebody check their copy of the code (I didn't download it) and see what the license was? If it was GPL or something similar
Well, it's murky. There's no copyright statement at all anywhere that I can find. The only mention of any licensing terms is this comment, at the beginning of the Windows program's Delphi source code for the main unit:
CPHack v0.1.0 by Eddy L O Jansson / Released under the GPL.
Unfortunately, Eddy didn't include the standard GPV boilerplate, nor did he include the COPYING file. I suspect that any attempt to distribute the program could be pounced upon by Mattel's lawyers, and broken.
they've already published a long, very good explanation of how exactly the software works. why would it matter whether they leave the software itself available?
they've done what they set out to do, which is expose flaws in the CyberPatrol system and disseminate information on the way [badly] it works. they've managed to shame the programmers behind cyberpatrol badly, even if the people they've shamed cyberpatrol in front of [slashdot] hated cyberpatrol anyway. The point it seemed to me wasn't the software; the point it seemed to me was that they reverse-engineered cyberpatrol. The software was just an extra, just something they posted to prove they were right about everything, and because they'd already written it..
why should they have to bother paying a lawyer, or bothering with _anything_ in court? sure the ACLU would pay for everything, but they'd still wind up being bothered. Why should we expect them to go through that? especially since they've already published the details of what cphack did in such deep detail that it seems that rewriting the program from scratch would be easy to anyone with even relatively elementary C skills.
Now if the article they wrote talking about cphack and reverse-engineering cyberpatrol were being taken down, well, then, that would be rather bothering. But that isn't happening; the settlement seems to concern only the cphack program itself.
and it seems to me that if they led to a long, drawn-out battle in court over cphack, then it would distract the public eye a lot from the real issues at the core of all this.. i think it's a lot more important to encourage people outside slashdot to read the cp-hacking article than encourage people inside slashdot to distribute the cphack program..
maybe i'm very confused, but what they're doing makes sense from where i'm standing.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I just updated my mirror page with a link to this slashdot article. I thought I'd post the others on the list here for everyone's edification (and because the server of my personal web page probably wouldn't take it if you went there for it!)
"Upping the stakes in a battle over a utility that reveals Cyberpatrol's list of off-limits websites, Mattel threatened mirror sites with contempt charges during a court hearing Monday afternoon."
"ACLU attorney 'surprised' as programmers surrender rights to their hack of Cyber Patrol filter and agree to permanent injunction."
"The American Civil Liberties Union criticized Internet filtering software maker Microsystems Software Inc. and its parent company Mattel Inc. on Friday, accusing them of attempting to limit free speech on the Internet."
"A federal judge in Boston will hear arguments on Monday over whether a program that reveals Cyberpatrol's secret blacklist should be banned from the Internet."
"Call it legal spam. Lawyers in the Cyber Patrol legal battle have created an e-precedent -- sending subpoenas by e-mail."
"A legal dispute between a U.S. toymaker that produces a popular Internet pornography filter and two programmers that decoded the software could heat up into a messy international brawl."
"Mattel is updating the Cyber Patrol blacklists for all of their customers to include the homepages of the authors and all of the mirrors, blocked under every blocking category the product has."
What a misleading headline. Yet another example of McPaper earning its abysmal reputation.
"A federal judge in Boston has tried to ban the distribution of a computer program that reveals CyberPatrol's secret list of sex sites."
"In addition to demanding the removal of the decryption utility, Mattel is also seeking the logfiles of the Swedish ISP that hosts the decryption utility, to identify everyone who has downloaded it to date. Today's news was filled with Mattel's PR lies about their suit."
"Toy-maker Mattel has sued two programmers who revealed how to circumvent its CyberPatrol blocking software."
Several news outlets uncritically ran Ted Bridis's AP newswire story characterizing the decryption program as a tool to let children view pornography:
cnet's version adds this interesting paragraph:
CNN's version also adds the cnet paragraph and some additional reportage, but still mischaracterizes the program. However, their later coverage was more evenhanded.
Among other things, the SCBoR would ensure that:
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
So does this statement hold up in court, or is the GPL ruined? Are we going to see more GPL programs get bought out and removed from market?
It does ensure that it is redistributable, doesnt' it?
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Or maybe they couldn't afford to prove they were right?
Presumption of innocence apparently doesn't apply in civil cases.
--
E_NOSIG
Close, and the difference favors re-implementaion.
Copyright only covers "creative expression" and specifically does not cover functional ideas. The 9th Circuit Court, in Sony v. Connectix, said:
Copyright protection does not extend to any "idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery" embodied in the copyrighted work.
This case is also pretty relevant to the whole Mattel snafu; in a nutshell, Connectix reverse-engineered a Sony Playstation, built and sold an emulator and Sony sued on copyright infringement grounds for the reverse-engineering - Sony massively lost the most recent round, their only chance to stop the emulator is to take it to the Supreme Court, and that's a mighty slim chance...
But back to your question, the difference is is that you can pretty much re-write functional components using the original as a blue print (reverse-engineering CPHACK), provided you're clever enough to only copy functional elements and avoid copying "creative expression". However, the threshhold for something to be a "creative expression" is amazingly low, so from the standpoint of being safe, it would be better to do as you suggest and re-implement from the text description of the method.
IANAL and this is not legal advice.
If I were the authors, I would 'give in' to Mattels demands simply to avoid legal bullshit, since I would realize there are already hundreds of mirrors with the software out there. The information has been widely distributed ... Mattel cant do anything about it now. Sucks to be them.
I have no Slashdot account, cope.
Yes, late Friday I made an agreement with the plaintiffs settling the cases in Boston and Vancouver out of court. I was planning to wait until I heard the results of today's hearing before making any announcement, but it sounds like that is now. I don't know Eddy's current status; last I heard from him he had not officially settled but was close to doing so.
I settled because I have made my point and don't need the headaches. I don't think it's appropriate to characterise this as Microsystems et al "winning". The document is out there, I know the mirror sites aren't going to take it down without a fight (even with my copyright assignment), and judging by the level of conspiracy theory here on Slashdot, the companies' public relations nightmares have only just begun.
Whatever public face they may put on their press releases, I don't think the plaintiffs are very happy right now. Whether they end up happy or having the last laugh will really depend upon how you, the public, reacts to this situation, and that's out of my hands.
There are serious jurisdiction issues for the Boston lawsuit, but the Vancouver lawsuit against me was certainly for real, and many of the relevant legal questions have not yet been decided in Canada. So I'd be faced with being a test case, and all the "fun" that involves. My right to do what I did may appear cut-and-dried to Slashdotters, but we'd have to educate the judge about that, and face all the litigation tricks that a well-funded multinational corporation can come up with. Litigation always involves a risk no matter how good one's case may appear at the outset. I'm a mathematician, not a gambler. I've got better ways to spend my time, thank you all so very much.
Yes, it would be more satisfying to walk away with a court decision saying, "Matthew, you didn't do anything bad, you're a good boy", but enough other people have told me that that it's not worth the hassle to try to get it from a court as well. I reached the point of diminishing returns. If you think that makes me a coward or a sell-out, feel free to prove yourself a better hacker than me by doing yourself whatever you think I ought to have done.
I'm sorry for the people who may find their situations worsened by my having made the copyright assignment. I still think that the overall effect of my actions has been positive. You might well want to explore the fact that the original documents gave permission to redistribute.
- Matthew Skala
You have to acknowledge they've risked alot by doing everything they've done, and they've started a real dialogue on the subject, and opened the eyes of alot of folks, not just technical folks either.
But, when it's your ass on the line, it's not as easy to throw up that middle finger in defiance.
The ACLU lawyer and me and you and all the armchair quarterbacks who've got something to say have just about dick to lose here. These guys futures are actually at risk. They fought a good fight, and frankly, what's there to win? the source is out, and can't be brought back in, just like DeCSS. They can't possible gain anything by trying to fight US law since they're in another country. If you are so gung ho about putting up a fight, be in the US, mirror the code, tell Mattel, and fight 'em in court. I'm sure the ACLU will back you too, and then you can see what it's like.
'nuff said.
That certainly seems to be the case. I can't see any way that Matt and his pal could have lost, and Mattel had started a potentially explosive PR problem by suing a couple of people for something that wasn't strictly illegal. They probably knew this before hand, as well, but felt that it was in their best interests to appear as though they were legally challenging the issue.
So what was the settlement, that's what I want to know. Chances are there's a NDA on it, and chances are the NDA is in order to hide the fact that Mattel may have paid these guys off.
Yes, I know that's hard to imagine, but think about the options they had. If they get sued, they have massive legal fees to deal with, and may or may not be able to countersue to recover those costs. If Mattel wants the problem to go away, offer to pay for the lawyers, and drop a few grand on each of them for their cooperation. No further charges, and the boys agree to stop publishing the software.
It seems rather reasonable. Mattel gets to look like it's protecting it's product diligently and winning. They guys don't lose anything, (they can always get the software off the net at this point), and everyone's happy.
The only concerning part is, is there now a market for software cracks to hold corporations hostage for small sums in order to not release their creations?
They may have been bought, but it wasn't the money.
Taken from the Wired News article:
"Co-author Matthew Skala of Canada signed a similar agreement giving up his rights for one dollar."
I don't really consider one dollar to be much of a payoff, do you?