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NYTimes, DeCSSm EFF, DVD, And Other Acronyms

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the that's-a-whole-lotta-capital-letters dept.

mudpup writes: "The NY Times has a nice story about Martin Garbus a well-known New York trial lawyer and First Amendment specialist, who was brought on board recently to assist the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the DVD case. My question is will The Motion Picture Association of America now be filing suit against the Times for linking to 2600's catalog of DeCSS mirror sites? Or will that Link disappear sometime before/after the West Coast wakes up this morning? "

7 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. What 2660.com have to say.. by JamesSharman · · Score: 5
    2600.com Have regarded this as a vote of support by the NYT.

    In what we see as an important show of support from a major force in journalism, the New York Times has linked directly to our list of sites which currently house the DeCSS code.

    The links have been a source of contention in recent weeks, as the MPAA and eight Hollywood film studios have sought to force us to remove them, claiming the links are the same as having the code published on our own site. We see it differently - while they may have been able to get a federal court to order the material off of our site, forbidding us from telling the world what other sites still have it would be a very ominous precedent to set.

    Read the rest of their news item Here.

  2. Better URL for story (no login) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4

    Read it here.

  3. It will probably stay there by MillMan · · Score: 4

    because the NY times has deep pockets. Intimidation doesn't work as well against a major corporation as it does against an individual with little money. There is really no threat of jail time against a corporation as there is with an individual, and any monetary penalties won't amount to much. The MPAA's plan of attack so far has been mostly to use playground-bully type tactics anyway.

    If anything the NY times can use this as free advertising if the MPAA tried any lawsuits or other "tactics".

  4. business speech is not free by G+Neric · · Score: 4
    There's a difference between business speech and other speech, including freedom-of-the-press speech, and business speech is regulated more.
    • So, you cannot run ads as a business making false claims like "we say our cigarettes do not give you cancer"; that speech can be censored.
    • However, a newspaper would be allowed to report "they say their cigarettes do not give you cancer"; that speech cannot be censored.
    ... under U.S. law, that is. I would presume that the dispute with 2600 would be along these lines.
  5. Pirates don't need DeCSS by molog · · Score: 4
    At a seminar on e-commerce and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act at Yale University this week, Gregory P. Goeckner, vice president and deputy general counsel of the MPAA, said that DeCSS greatly increased the threat of movie piracy on the Internet.

    I took this from the article linked to. DeCSS does not increase the threat of movie piracy and here is why. DeCSS is being argued that you can copy a movie onto your hard drive and thus can post it on the internet. You can get an MPEG-2 of a DVD movie from some of the players that are on Windows. If all you wanted to do was post an MPEG-2 you could either set up a huge buffer for the movie in the player or use on of the utilities out there taking advantage of the player. In fact most would see it as more of a pain in the ass to compile DeCSS then to just use the tools already out there. That nulls the comment above because if DeCSS is a tool for piracy it is nothing more then a redundancy.
    Molog

    So Linus, what are we doing tonight?

    --
    So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
    The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
  6. Entire 2600 news item by request.. by JamesSharman · · Score: 4
    NEW YORK TIMES LINKS TO DECSS CODE

    04/28/00

    In what we see as an important show of support from a major force in journalism, the New York Times has linked directly to our list of sites which currently house the DeCSS code.

    The links have been a source of contention in recent weeks, as the MPAA and eight Hollywood film studios have sought to force us to remove them, claiming the links are the same as having the code published on our own site. We see it differently - while they may have been able to get a federal court to order the material off of our site, forbidding us from telling the world what other sites still have it would be a very ominous precedent to set.

    The action by the Times comes in an article in today's electronic edition. What makes it particularly significant is this paragraph in which our attorney, Martin Garbus, is quoted:

    "Take a hypothetical case, he said: If a major newspaper that operated an online news site wrote an article saying that somebody had broken the DVD encryption code, and it linked to a site that had the code on it, 'I think they'd have absolutely every right to do that.'"

    At the bottom of the page, they do precisely that, linking not only to 2600, but to "2600's catalog of DeCSS mirror sites".

  7. Probably not. But you can help. by Booker · · Score: 4

    I did... ok, it was only $35, but it makes a difference. Perhaps it's time to slashdot the EFF again? Join here, or contribute directly to the DVD Defense Fund here. "Make a special gift to help EFF defend against the movie industry's attempt to criminalize open-source coding."

    They've got a point...

    ---