Amicus Brief in DeCSS case

e271828 writes "Brian Kernighan, Marvin Minsky, Ron Rivest, and Richard Stallman are among the CS stalwarts that have jointly filed an amici curiae brief supporting the EFF and 2600. The brief, hosted on Cryptome makes for excellent reading." This is to accompany the appeal that we mentioned a few days ago.

Comments

Re:Some of the Arguments

[Squid]

I seem to recall a case in the 1800s involving counterfeit music rolls for player pianos. Judgement was something to the effect that, machine-read documents could be protected under copyright law the same as human-read ones.

That judgement, I also seem to remember, WAS the standard by which computer software was allowed to be copyrighted up until the next major reform in copyright law sometime in the 1980s.

Now I want to go a step further. Machine language and people language are equivalent for copyright purposes - otherwise software, and for that matter, the MPEG streams contained on a DVD, can't be protected by copyright! But the MPAA, which THRIVES on the fact that machine and human languages are equivalent under copyright law, wants to separate the two under the First Amendment - and it's gonna be damn hard for them to demonstrate LEGALLY (not financially) why they should be allowed to have it both ways.

news.com has a story

[LennyDotCom]

about a ISP that is not backing down to the MPAA threats
news.com
good timing

A lot

[coyote-san]

You obviously don't know much about how the US judicial system works.

Civil suits are between two parties. Everyone else is an observer, even if it's clear to everyone involved that the plantiff carefully searched for a defendant who 1) didn't have many resources to fight the case and 2) seemed to have the best case for establishing broad precedents.

Once the judgement comes down against the plantiff the details don't matter - the precedence has been established and every subsequent court case in this jurisdiction must consider it. (I won't get into binding vs. non-binding precedents, etc.) This is a powerful tool for suppressing dissent, since every future defendant must prove why the precedence doesn't apply in their case.

Needless to say, this create a HUGE potential for mischief. To balance it, courts allow others affected by any precedence established, but not involved in the specific case, to file briefs that may be considered by the court. These briefs usually illuminate points that one party doesn't want brought up - and the other party *can't* bring up because of the rules of the courtroom. This might result in a reversed judgement, or at least the restriction of the judgement to be non-precedent setting.

The MPAA may be fuming about the content of this brief, but there's not a whole lot they can do about it. Any attempt to suppress it would merely serve to highly just how carefully constrained their case is -- and why it must not be used to establish precedence for suppressing such publications.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but I paid attention in civics class. If you think I have no right to discuss this (and potentially learn from others) then you believe that either 1) voters are best when ignorant and apathetic or 2) that only practicing lawyers should have the right to vote. Either way, you are no friend of democracy.

Excellent Brief

[Arker]

Very well reasoned and argued, as one would expect given the source.

Perhaps the most important quote:

2. Among academics and programmers, communicating in computer code (in addition to or in lieu of a natural language) is essential "[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts ...", the core purpose of copyright. U.S. CONST., art. I, 8 (Copyright Clause). Minimizing First Amendment protections given to code would deter, not promote, the progress of science.

That point cannot be made often enough. What the MPAA wants to do is use copyright in a way completely antithetical to the reason copyrights were granted to begin with.

Re:This is a really good brief.

[Jim Tyre]

It's a good brief, and it's especially worth reading if you think no lawyer can write anything except impenetrable jargon.

Thanks - since I'm the lawyer who wrote the brief. ;-)

My favorite part of the brief is footnote 4, which compares source code to legal citation: each is impenetrable to outsiders, but each is a clean, compact, and efficient representation, which is transparent to people who speak the language.

I started law school in 1975, but I still remember my reaction when I saw my first case citation, something like "What the HELL is that?"

To whatever extent peole like the brief, though, I take only some of the credit. The amici helped me a lot, of course, and at the top of my help list was Seth Finkelstein, a friend and excellent programmer.

There will be more amicus briefs in support of 2600, due Friday. I just needed to get mine in early because of my own schedule.

C as English

[touretzky]

Omri Schwartz has written some Perl scripts that automatically translate C code to English, and the English back to C. This is similar to the c2txt2c program that was used to encode blowfish, but Omri's code is a more general and robust solution that has successfully encoded css-auth. Omri's code and the output it produces for css-auth can be found in the Gallery of CSS Descramblers.

The URL for the Gallery is cited in the amicus brief. I'm proud to point out that among the co-sponsors of this brief there are four Carnegie Mellon faculty, including the dean of the School of Computer Science. MPAA has been keeping a hands-off attitude toward the Gallery, perhaps because they realize how bad it would look if they tried to censor an academic work.