PlayStation Reverse Engineering Stands Up In Court

hobbs writes: "The Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from Sony, suing Connectix (Bleem) for reverse engineering their PlayStation BIOS. This wasn't about copyright, just reverse engineering, which the courts say fell under "fair use". CNET Article
I find this interesting in the States since reverse engineering here is not usually well accepted/protected legally." This seems like a small clearing in the creeping intellectual property tangle. Of course, that law suit probably wasn't any help to Bleem, despite the outcome. [Updated 3rd Oct 0:13 GMT by timothy] Thanks to the several readers who have pointed out by e-mail or in comments, as Kufat does, that "Bleem is not made by connectix. Connectix makes Virtual Game Station; Bleem is a competitor to VGS."

Comments

Only Denial of Preliminary Injunction Upheld

[Cy Guy]

The cnet story is very poorly written, so I understand how it was interpretted by the original submittor, but Supreme Court ruling only confirmed the 9th Circuits ruling that SONY was not entitled to injunctive relief, therefor allowing the release of the Mac version of Virtual Game Station.

Here is today's ruling as report by the wire services. AP.

"The court, without comment Monday, let Connectix continue selling its Virtual Game Station until a lower court rules on Sony's claim of unfair competition."

connectix vgs != bleem

[bran880]

Connectix's VGS emulator is not Bleem (made by Bleem Inc.). IIRC, Bleem didn't use the bios at all and Sony couldn't sue them over that.

This is a beautiful thing.

[sulli]

The impact on other cases such as DeCSS may be quite substantial and positive. After all, what are LiVid and related tools but a VGS-like implementation to play DVDs? And if so, is not css-descramble just a component of such a solution? If this sort of reverse engineering is protected under fair use, then so also DVDs, methinks.

Thank heavens for the Ninth Circuit.

Totally meaningless.

[rjh]

This is something which arises so frequently that it's become a major annoyance to the Court. The Court will deny cert ("deny cert" == "refuse to hear arguments") on a case, and presto, the popular press and most of America thinks that means anything.

It means nothing.

Denying cert only means the Court won't hear arguments. It doesn't mean the Court thinks the legal reasoning is correct; it doesn't mean the Court is approving the lower court's decision; it doesn't mean anything .

Many cases are denied cert because their legal issues are not as clear as the Court would like ("bad cases make for bad law", as the axiom goes), or the Court wants to give it a few years to let legal scholarship tackle the issues, or the Court thinks this is an issue which Congress will soon issue "direction" (read: legislation) on, or... any of dozens of reasons.

It is tremendously unwise to think that the Court's denial of cert means anything, no matter what the Court says in their response.

Don't get happy; the Court hasn't done anything for us.

reverse engineering is a time honored practice

[cluge]

This wasn't about copyright, just reverse engineering, which the courts say fell under "fair use". CNET Article I find this interesting in the States since reverse engineering here is not usually well accepted/protected legally."

I find the last statement odd, reverse engineering is a time honored tradition that goes back a long way. Remember all the early "non-ibm" BIOSes were reverse engineered. The hoops that manufacturers went through to insure the integrity of the reverse engineering were pretty intense. For a long time reverse engineering for the BIOS was done as follows.

• team 1 of engineers inspects pokes and generally fiddles with a known BIOS, and then writes a report on what a BIOS should do based on what they discovered the BIOS that they were fooling with did.
• team 2 of engineers who have 0 contact with team 1 then use said report to design a new bios without ever seeing the source code or the other bios in action.

I think in most states laws were passed or clarified in Court so that the procedure became greatly streamlined. This allowed a lot of smaller players to get into business and do some reverse engineering WITHOUT needing to pay 2 separate teams of engineers. The problem had been some recent bad legislation that seems to contradict time honored reverse engineering/fair use laws.

The other problem is our patent system. I think this is a small victory, the real challenge lays ahead. That challenge is deciding what can and cannot be patented.

Too bad that it had to drag on for so long before a decision was rendered. If your pockets are deep enough you can sue, even if your wrong. The technological window time wise is so small that any chance your competition had is gone before the litigation is finished.

I wonder what this means for Cue cat?

Re:Logic - no land for the courts

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

See, the "encoding" of the programs into a form executable by a Play Station is intended to let them run on a Play Station. It was not specifically intented to "effectively control access to a [copyrighted] work.". So the DMCA doesn't apply. Now if Sony releases a new Play Station, deliberately encrypts their games' code (even with a trivial 1 bit encryption) and makes the new Play Station decrypt the code to run it, and intends the encryption to "effectively control access to a [copyrighted] work." (specifically their games), then they could win a DMCA suit.

So all the need to do is say it contains some encryption routine, implement their XOR 0xFF encryption or something similar, use it in their new games and consoles, and presto, reverse-engineering it is now illegal in at least one jurisdiction. Law is strange, isn't it?

Thank goodness I'm not a lawyer, I couldn't force myself to deal with such illogical laws on a day to day basis, I'd go nuts.

Implications for DeCSS, CueCat, etc.

[jayfoo2]

Now I'm not a lawyer, or even all that bright, but doesn't this ruling have serious implications for other 'products' that are created as a result of reverse engineering.

So my small brain spits out two theorys, anyone know which is (more) correct.

Theory 1.

It's the content that is copyrighted, not the delivery method, thus copying the content would be illegal, but changing the delivery method (i.e. DeCSS) is all good.

Theory 2

Hold on there sparky, this has nothing to do with DeCSS or anything else because the motion picture industry has declared the method itself copyrighted. Sony just missed that trick.

Anyone?

Logic - no land for the courts

[bonzoesc]

Logically, if you can reverse engineer a complex computing device like a PlayStation, then it ought to be legal to at least link to the results of reverse engineering a simple encryption methond, right? Well, the courts seem to be unable to relate their results to each other for some sort of consistency. With this ruling (which is better than Judge Kaplan's against 2600), it can be reasoned that emulating a simple DVD player is as legal as emulating a PlayStation.

Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate

Re:Logic - no land for the courts

[kaphka]

Well, the courts seem to be unable to relate their results to each other for some sort of consistency. With this ruling (which is better than Judge Kaplan's against 2600), it can be reasoned that emulating a simple DVD player is as legal as emulating a PlayStation.

Fortunately, the courts are still smarter than most Slashdot posters. (Congress is another story...) They actually read the laws... and they know that the DMCA prohibits reverse engineering of copyright protection technologies. VGS is not designed to "circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." DeCSS is. (I know, it's a little more complicated than that. I've been through all the arguments.)

So, to answer all those wise asses who ask, "Am I violating the DMCA when I use an emulator? Am I violating the DMCA when I view the source of a web page? Am I violating the DMCA when I wash my socks?": No.

I highly recommend that everyone read the text of the DMCA, as linked above. It's an important issue which will only become more important in the coming years, so it would help if everyone knows what they're arguing about.

Nothing to do with DeCSS

[kaphka]

I've posted this in reply to another comment here, but that's just going to get buried, and everyone else here seems to be making the same mistake. IANAL.

The Connectix case was about traditional copyright law. Sony said, "Reverse engineering is illegal!" Various judges said, "No, reverse engineering is not illegal."

The DeCSS case is about the DMCA. The MPAA is saying, "Reverse engineering a copyright protection mechanism is illegal!" It remains to be seen what the judges will say to that, but the DMCA seems to be on the MPAA's side.*

Let's try some basic logic here.

"It is not always illegal to reverse engineer."
"It is illegal to reverse engineer a copyright protection system."

Those two statements do not contradict eachother. Consider:

"It is not always illegal to swing a baseball bat."
"It is illegal to swing a baseball bat at someone's head."

Does that help? I'm sorry if this is not the most articulate explanation, but people constantly misunderstand legal issues due to a poor grasp of simple logic. I can't think of a better way to explain it, so I have to settle for speaking slowly and using small words.

* I know, there's a lot of room for argument here, but it's still a very different situation.