Court Rules For Connectix, Against Sony

Robotech_Master writes "According to this article in Wired News, a court has just dismissed many of Sony's charges against Connectix in the Virtual Game Station emulation case, noting that 'both copyright and trademark law favor broad consumer choice.'"

Comments

Re:It's about time.

[jms]

There was one news story in the last day that may prove to be extremely important, although it was not in slashdot. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Violence Against Women act, because they said that Congress had no authority to pass the act. Congress said that the law derived its authority from the instetstate commerce clause, and the Supreme Court said, in effect, "no way."

Congress regularly uses the Interstate Commerce Clause -- which says that Congress has the right to regulate interstate commerce -- to pass laws that really have nothing to do with interstate commerce. The Supreme Court has gone along with this practice for a long time, but the current court appears ready to impose limits.

If the court has in fact decided to end the "interstate commerce loophole", then huge bodies of federal law will be vulnerable and may be challenged, as much of federal law has no constitutional basis besides the thinly stretched doctrine of "it somehow affects interstate commerce."

and that would have enormous consequences.

Confusing error in Wired story

[alkali]

The Wired story has an error which may cause readers some confusion. The story states:

Judge Charles Legge of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday dismissed Sony's claims that Connectix violated trademark and copyright laws with its Virtual Game Station software.

In fact, Judge Legge is a judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the federal trial court in which Sony sued Connectix. He had previously granted a preliminary injunction in favor of Sony and against Connectix on the basis that Sony was likely to succeed on its copyright and trademark claims. The Ninth Circuit (the federal appeals court which hears appeals from the Northern District of California) instructed Judge Legge to dissolve this preliminary injunction in its February 10, 2000 opinion:

[Judge Legge] concluded that Sony was likely to succeed on its infringement claim because Connectix's "intermediate copying " was not a protected "fair use" under 17 U.S.C. sec. 107. [Legge] enjoined Connectix from selling the Virtual Game Station or from copying or using the Sony BIOS code in the development of other Virtual Game Station products. [ . . . ]

We reverse and remand with instructions to dissolve the injunction. The intermediate copies made and used by Connectix during the course of its reverse engineering of the Sony BIOS were protected fair use, necessary to permit Connectix to make its non-infringing Virtual Game Station function with PlayStation games. [ . . . ]

[Legge] also found that Sony is likely to prevail on its claim that Connectix's sale of the Virtual Game Station program tarnishes the Sony PlayStation mark under 15 U.S.C. sec. 1125. We reverse that ruling as well.

In light of the Ninth Circuit's opinion, Judge Legge has now ruled that these claims by Sony (though not all claims by Sony) are deficient as a matter of law. Readers may judge for themselves whether they should be surprised by this turn of events.

Good for Dreamcast?

[miguelitof]

So the obvious question that comes to my mind is: isn't this great news for the Dreamcast? Bleem is coming out with a Dreamcast port of their software. People will now be able to play a vast array of Playstation games on their Dreamcast, with the games looking better on the Dreamcast than they looked originally on the Playstation.

Using Bleem, Dreamcast owners will have access to 400 or so Playstation games, along with a projected 200 Dreamcast games, before Playstation 2 is even released in the US.

This could make things interesting!

Killing Blow?

[nezroy]

"The electronics giant also claimed that Connectix tarnished the PlayStation trademark by selling the rival Virtual Game Station product."

"Dilution by tarnishment occurs when a famous mark is linked to poor quality or unwholesome products, or otherwise displayed in a derogatory manner.[46] If the use of the mark does not result in negative associations for the senior trademark user, then there is no dilution by tarnishment." - http://www.loundy.com/JMLS-Trademark.html

It sounds like Sony was really reaching to try and get Connectix on any of these kinds of accusations. I doubt that the dismissal of those charges were in any way a shock to Sony. I'm guessing they've been aiming to nail Connectix on the theft of a trade-secret all along, and these other trumped up charges are just for filler. As a result, I don't think the dismissal of these issues is really a positive sign for Connectix at all; rather, it probably bodes that the legal battle is going just as Sony has intended it to all along. With the verdict on the trade-secret theft pending, I wouldn't be popping marguaritas at Connectix any time soon....

No DMCA?

[HalJohnson]

From the article:

Earlier this year, the court issued a ruling upholding Connectix's right to use a process known as reverse engineering to develop a product for playing PlayStation games on home computers.

Wonder why Sony isn't hiding under the umbrella of the DMCA like the MPAA with DeCSS. Perhaps there was no protection (to parallel with the weak encryption used by CSS) to be broken in order to reverse engineer?

This whole thing gets sillier all the time. "You can reverse engineer, except things we protect so that you dont."

TO stay somewhat on topic, I don't really see why it upset Sony so much. They sell the console at a loss (initially anyway) and make the majority of the revenue from the licensing of games. You would think that:

More people able to play PSX games = more games sold = more licensing revenue.

I could see Sony going apeshit about people developing (more importantly, selling) unlicensed games, but trying to stop an additional way to play licensed games seems counter-productive.

But then again, since when has corporate paranoia made sense? :)

Reverse Engineering and DeCSS

[Mark F. Komarinski]

Sooo..if Connectix can reverse engineer Sony software and hardware, what's the difference between that and reverse engineering CSS? Or is this strictly a DCMA thing and Sony didn't sue under that law?

Creation ONLY for economic profit??

[gilroy]

Quoth the poster:

Uh-huh. And if these big companies can't make money, who's going to create the warez and music for you to share?

Yeah, you're right. I've always heard that Aristotle, Aquinas, and Shakespeare wrote their works for the quick bucks they could make.

Realistically, true artists produce art because they have to -- something in their souls move them and won't allow them to not create. I think that a lot of programmers are similar ... most of the open source projects began because (a) someone had an "itch" they had to scratch and (b) once they had begun to scratch it, they weren't opposed to helping others scrath their itches, too.

If economic value is the only value you recognize, of course, this makes less than sense. In fact, it's downright scary. That's why the suits and the drones and droids absolutely despise and (I think) secretly fear the FSOS movement. They don't understand it, because it's not entirely driven by economic profit. But if you free your mind from those sorts of blinders you begin to see that such things can make sense.