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Pavlovich Jurisdictional Challenge Denied
Appellate Court Issues Precedent Setting Ruling in Cyber-Jurisdiction ruling
The Sixth District Court of Appeals has issued its ruling in the jurisdictional case filed by Indiana student Matt Pavlovich, a foreign defendant in the California DVD case. You may recall that Pavlovich had moved the trial court to dismiss him from the main DVD action due to lack of jurisdiction. When the trial court denied his motion, Pavlovich filed a petition for Writ of Mandate with the Court of Appeals - that court summarily denied his petition. Pavlovich then turned to the Supreme Court for relief by way of a Petition for Review. In a rare move, all seven justices of the Supreme Court unanimously granted review and sent the matter back to the Court of Appeals with instructions that they re-consider the case. Following additional filings and oral arguments, today the Court of Appeals issued a published, written opinion again denying Pavlovich's petition. The Court's order will be available on our web site at www.legal.wao.com shortly, and is also accessible through the Court of Appeal's site.
Today's opinion dramatically increases the jurisdictional reach of California's court system, creating nearly limitless jurisdiction over internet disputes involving the motion picture industry, the technology industry, and any other industry reputed to exist in California. Because the exercise of jurisdiction is fundamentally a question of state power, we contend that this type of hyper-extension of California's long-arm statute violates the Constitutional safeguards found within the Due Process Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Because the decision affects the Constitutional Rights of U.S. Citizens everywhere, we are hopeful that the Supreme Court will again grant review of the Appellate Court's decision.
The underlying California Case:
Pavlovich, along with Andrew Bunner and some 500 other individual defendants, have been targeted by the Motion Picture Industry trade group DVD CCA in the California case. DVD CCA alleges that the defendants, who allegedly found the DeCSS information on the World Wide Web and then republished it, may not continue to publish the information based on California's Uniform Trade Secret's Act. Bunner claims that, like any other innocent republisher of information, he has a constitutionally protected right to publish this particular information and is not liable under the UTSA. Bunner, along with Amicus briefs from the prestigious IEEE and ACIS groups, also argues that the information he republished was properly and permissibly reverse-engineered and as such cannot be enjoined under the UTSA. In his papers, Bunner explains that Reverse-Engineering, along with the publication of technical discoveries, has long been a mainstay of innovation and evolution in the field of high-technology. Enjoining the publication of technical information, and stopping permissible reverse-engineering, would necessarily empower entities to use technologies like CSS to manipulate markets and bar consumer protections.
NEW YORK CASE:
The New York case continues through the appellate process. Appellants presented oral arguments before the appeals court and have recently responded to a number of written questions posed by the court. Additional resources are available at www.eff.org.
Resources:
HS Law Group's web site with information about the DeCSS cases:www.legal.wao.com
http://www.cryptome.org- tends to get the most recent filings fairly quickly
EFF Archive for DVD-CCA Cal. trade secret case: http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/DVDCCA_case/
EFF's DVD Archive: http://www.eff.org/pub/Intellectual_property/DVD/
Allonn E. Levy, Esq.
HS LAW GROUP a.p.c.
210 N. Fourth St. Fourth Fl.
San Jose, CA 95112
I doubt that'll happen. I can't see the masses of America cheering for Big Business. It's just not going to work. I think that if Hollywood takes a stance it'll be more against the Man, like the Corporation in AntiTrust (a terrible movie, but i enjoyed it anyway.) That one was pro-Open Source, but no one saw it.
Kat -- Alcohol and calculus don't mix. Never drink and derive.
Someone somewhere explained that the wording is so harsh not because the court believes these "Facts" to be true, but because it must assume the complaint is true for the sole purpose of determining jurisdiction - that is, it can't decide whether the facts are true or not unless it has jurisdiction, which hasn't been decided yet.
Granted that there's going to be a body count- let's hit them back first! If it's legal, protected speech to publish a list of MD's who perform abortions, then it must be legal to publish a list of judges, lawyers, and industry executives who must be executed to preserve the freedoms we Americans think we're paying for with our taxes. The flip side of the criminalization of Open Source is that if we can make it common knowledge that working for or acting in the interest of anti-Open Source can be, heh, hazardous to your health, people will be forced to re-think their position or suffer the consequences. Protest and peaceful resistance is futile. Buy a gun. Use it.
Scientologists destroyed it.
That would be India I believe.
Rich
this is not what they are saying. by relying on Calder (a case where a tort is commited in Florida whose effects are in California) they are saying that this was a tort done somewhere whose effects are in Cali. see also Janmark in the 7th circuit.
This is, or course, clearly the wrong authority. The proper case is Zippo which more or less says that inter-active content gives jurisdiction, but simple downloading does not as one has not availed themself of the laws and protection i Cali. Their use of Burger King is also improper as the Defendant had no expectation of being haled into court in Cali. (regardless of the movie industrie's presence). The fact that DVD's have other uses makes this more like Sony in finding that since VCR's could do more than pirate that Sony was not facilitating.
No, the plan is that US law is applied everywhere, not the other way round.
People from any country should be held by three laws, US law, international law, and national law. Of course people from the US are only subject to US law.
Where is the part that is difficult to understand? Quite simple, really it's called the new world order.
Just wondering how this applies.
In the U.S. you cannot be prosecuted for an act committed before said act was prohibited by law. There's a latin word for it, what was it -- ex post facto I think. As bogus a law as DMCA is, since DeCSS was written before it was passed, it seems that should render DeCSS unprosecutable.
But then, I suppose the thing "charge" thatis being brought against them is "trafficking" in circumvention technology.
The whole thing is just stupid.
This is a moronic decision, for one very simple reason: There is *plenty* of precedent that you do not subject yourself to the jurisdiction of a State's courts merely by putting up a web site. Instead, you must *purposefully avail* yourself of that State's laws in some way in order for the exercise of jurisdiction to comply with due process under the U.S. Constitution. Here, the intermediate appellate court (clearly in the pocket of the entertaiment industry) held that anything that *affects* someone who conducts business in California is now subject to California jurisdiction. This rule does not comport with due process, makes no sense, and indicates that EVERYONE WHO HAS EVER PUBLISHED A WEBSITE COULD CONCIEVEABLY BE SUBJECT TO JURISDICTION IN CALIFORNIA--a moronic rule at best. I *guarantee* that this will be reversed by the Cali. Supreme Court, and if not by them, by the U.S. Supremes, who will almost certainly take this case in. --J
I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners. - Berke Breathed
I liked the last paragraph...
It is as if the poster is instantaneously present in different places at the same time, and simultaneously delivering his material at those different places.
Godlike powers, no? Are people who distribute materials via the web to be treated as Omnipresent? What's next?
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
"The suit was meant to prevent the dissemination of DeCSS, a code whose original intent was to let programmers create a DVD player for Linux machines."
I'll say this much for CNet - this is the first time I've seen anything besides niche geek sites refer to DeCSS as anything other than "software intended to let people make illegal copies of DVDs". Now sure CNet isn't exactly one of the major mass media news outlets, but it's nice that they're paying attention enough to avoid the usual "evil hackers vs. DVD CCA" connotations that come with any DeCSS-related news article...
Mike Markley - *NIX Sysadmin and all-around geek - finger for PGP key
I'm not at all surprised that judges think that open source enthusiasts are pirates; Think about the rallying cry, "Information wants to be free!" To the non-technical audience, that means "I don't want to pay for my information!"
That is what it means to a large percentage of the technical audience too.
Would it be possible to encrypt the DeCSS with ROT-13, making it available to anybody with a secret decoder ring found in a cereal box. And at the same time it would be unavailable to authorities without breaking the DMCA themself ?
-Linux is SO fast it does an infinite loop in 5 seconds.
If you are correct, it might turn out that California can't apply its laws to other US states but they can still try to apply them to foreign countries.
Curiouser and curiouser.
That argument is a red herring. The most common use for DeCSS is in ripping DVDs to other formats (e.g. DivX) for trading over the net.
If i was going to copy and "republish" DVD's, as the court accused Pavlovich of doing, why the hell would i want to use DeCSS? Am i supposed to decrypt the data, dump it to my hard drive, re-encrypt it, and write it back to a DVD? I don't even think that's possible, but even if it were, why wouldn't i just use a method that copied the content AS IT IS on the original? DeCSS, as far as pirating tools go, is a terrible one. BECAUSE IT IS NOT A PIRATING TOOL.
I can't anon servers really doing too much against a concerted effort by the government, especially an offseas one.
Want to know who anon29010 is? Well, as a good spying government, you have plenty of servers in-place as nodes on the information superhighway, and powerful computers attached to them, and see stuff routed to the anon server. Just start matching the bodies of messages on the way to bodies of messages posted (with a little reassembling, of course, and all automated.)
It may (don't know) be illegal for the FBI or CIA to do this inside the US without a court order, but outside? Rules don't apply, I'm sure there are plenty of warehouses of servers overseas doing exactly this kind of thing.
While I don't want to disagree that there are a lot of stupid decisions that have been made, have you READ the Microsoft decisions (Findings of Fact) (Appeals court)? Both Jackson and the Appeals Court (using Jackson's analysis) break down technology issues remarkably well.
They may not know it, but they're capable of learning it.
According to the CA Secretary of the State, "DVD COPY CONTROL ASSOCIATION, INC" is a Delaware corporation. So we have a Delaware corporation suing a Texas citizen and asserting that California should have jurisdiction? How silly is that?
Also, it seems that it's fundamentally different to allow a California citizen to avail themselves of California courts against a citizen of a different state than it is to allow a corporation to do the same.
I am very sorry I drafted the previous posting poorly. Absolutely no personal attack was intended.
My intention was to insinuate that certain law professors were smoking something. My point is that there are SOME people who want the doors to courthouses to be more open to some people than others. I think that the law professors who think that it is even *possible* to have them be more open to poor people than rich people are not connected to reality regardless of the purity of their motives.
My point in offering the point about law professors was to admit that your views are clearly within the NON-JUDICIAL spectrum of thought. Quite frankly, the United States is the most plaintiff-friendly legal system in the world that I know of. Part and parcel of that is a very low level of contact required for anyone to sue anyone. The jurisdictional part of that development well precedes the litigation explosions of the 80s and 90s.
Nevertheless, although close to the line (and I can't really say how the Supreme Court would rule on this one) the court's opinion is not unreasonable in light of existing Supreme Court precedent.
The Nolo page is quite correct that "minimum contacts" is the standard. Throwing a rock at someone standing in a state would clearly be a "minimum contact" with the state. When a guy named Toeppen put a picture of Pana, Illinois on a web page at the domain panavision.com he got himself locked into personal jurisdiction in California under the "minimum contacts" standard. (Personally, I hate that case.) Although not the Supreme Court, the 9th Circuit is pretty much the same thing for California purposes.
There is a 9th Circuit copyright case that very strongly protects the right to reverse engineer under the copyright act. The merits of the defense can be very strong. If jurisdiction (in a vacuum) exists in both California and Indiana (and the defendant has never said that the ONLY problem is that the case is not being heard in Indiana) then resolving the tension is covered by the doctrine of forum non conveniens, not personal jurisdiction.
This is really run-of-the mill law. People in tons of non-Internet industries have been facing it for decades. If the defendant wins the personal jurisdiction issue, then he gets dead-meat sued in Indiana, for what now would be trivial savings. (Live in Texas. Defending in Indiana is cheaper than defending in California?) When is the best time to confront the merits rather than run away based on legal technicalities that cannot be avoided indefinitely?
The "American Rule" of legal costs is that each party bears his own costs. It makes it easy for a plaintiff to bring a suit fearlessly. Sometimes the little guy benefits, and sometimes he is oppressed. But this is not a debate about the "loser pays" European rule.
The fact that you are fucking her at all - that's a Trade Secret.
When someone else out there discovers the position you used to fuck her, without seeing, hearing about, or witnessing in any way, shape or form, and uses that position to fuck another child - that's reverse engineering.
However, posting pictures and links on the web to any of these things would still be illegal. I don't think it should be, but the US is anti-child.
Stupidity never felt so good.
Seriously, what their lawsuit actually boils down to is "Waaaaaaa! I'll get you."
now if we can just teach warez fanboys good programming, maybe we can tap a whole new market of emerging programmers...
dude, wanna join our 1337 open-source group?
From what I remember the Church of Scientology went after it and they shut down rather than handing over any users real identities. Well done them!
...
As to a P2P system with crypto, don't hold your breath! Have a look at the Grid computing initiatives from IBM & CERN since this covers much of the same ground - distributed storage, various formats & operating systems, authentication and encryption. While I'm sure we'll have something available *really soon now* the idea has been kicking around for 3 years and most of the work in this area is poor.
The problem of course is remembering where the data is. Its all very well suggesting it get broken down into chunks and then distributed but you then have to start thinking about what if the person storing it has a systems crash and loses it? do I replicate once, twice, three times? And what do you do about finding it? A central database (or even a replicated hierarchical one)? would you trust the org which is hosting it? They may not be able to access the information if its encrypted but they know where it all is if the gov wants it. Which puts us back in the same position as Napster.
And as to voting stuff off
Why the fuck was he even allowed to testify against himself?
Here is the problem, the EFF and the community at large have been fighting a defensive war, one in which we have no hope of winning, because our opponent hold all the cards. They get to say who get is sued/arrested and where the trial takes place, usually California, so they can miximize thier chances of getting a Judge they have already bought off.
What we need to do is take the fight to them. Bring a class action law suit against the MPAA, the DvD-CSA and the US Government for attempting to deny us our Contitutional Rights to Free Speech, Freedom of the Press and Fair Use. We can even use this new ruling against them and bring the law suit in any jurisdiction we want, say Moose Breath Montana, where they don't take kindly to big business or big government and they understand that the DMCA abridges the Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press and guts Fair Use.
"Our products just aren't engineered for security,"
-Brian Valentine,VP in charge of MS Windows Development
The laws they are making (by and large) are wrong, and many of the decisions are wrong.
Things must change. We need a new system. New methods of choosing our rulers (or even doing away with them entirely) new methods of deciding right and wrong in cases, to fit our new methods of communication and the new global reach of these communications.
This court is insane, or demonstrably incompetent. But the system that created it is also culpable, and must change or be replaced.
Not only that, but he is using this article (posted yesterday by Hemos) to get his own 2cents into the debate. Same cnet article and everything!
They closed it down in 1996 (was it really that long ago?).
I can't see how such a ludicrous proposition would survive appeal. On the other hand, given the current state of this country (which allows jack-booted thugs to steal people's homes and cars with only a mockery of "due process" by merely alleging "someone with that much money must have gotten it by selling drugs"), I'm not so sure. Judges have ruled that civil forfeiture (taking of property from people who have not been found guilty of any crime) is legal, so they may very well "buy" California's argument that they have jurisdiction over the whole wide world.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
The judge does not know, and cannot know whether it was throwing a rock illegally or handing a rock legally until the law suit is DECIDED.
It is illogical to say that the law suit cannot be FILED because the plaintiff is wrong. If the plaintiff is wrong, PROVE the plaintiff is wrong. You prove things in courts. The judge hears a lawsuit to figure out who is right and who is wrong without assuming the final conclusion.
Jurisdiction is not about who is right or wrong. It is about whether the judge has the power to EVEN LISTEN to the parties. The defendant was saying that the judge in California was not allowed to read one word the plaintiffs wrote or hear one word they spoke about this matter. The defendnat's statement was not "what I did was legal" it was "what I did was beyond your reach no matter how bad it was or how badly people were hurt or how badly I intended it or how illegal it was because you cannot reach ME."
Of course, the position in this discussion is that open source programmers get to tell judges that they are beyond the reach of a judge because they are open source programmers and that when they say they are beyond the reach of a court or are right the judge has to rule in his favor. Hah.
It is a criminal action to decode DVD's, right or wrong it is illegal. By the way the case is about weather or not he can be tried under California law. I think the Supreme Court justices know a whole hell of a lot more about the law the you or anyone on Slashdot so I wouldn't quite call them morons.
It's more likely that they do have a clue, and are just being elusive on this fact. Their entire argument is based on the fact that DeCSS is facilitating piracy; as soon as this is disproven, the case disappears. They're doing everything they can to make the courts ignore this fact at all costs.
Most Americans are idiots.
P.
...it may have advocated open source, but I could have spent the $9 and 2 hours of my time on more important things.
how can you be so dumb and compare child porn to DeCSS code ???
What an unrealistic female. ;-)
And anyway, if these hackers are open-sourcing everything, then where'd the money for the missile facility come from?
Kat -- Alcohol and calculus don't mix. Never drink and derive.
Well part of it is that we can't just honor treaties. If treaties carried the full weight of law, it would mean that the President and a majority of the Senate could short-circuit the House.
Treaties need to be enabled after being agreed to by the ordinary legislative process. But there's no guarantee that they will be, or that they won't be unchanged, or that such laws could be constitutional.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
The point is that as long as we're a community of pirates, the public will see all of our "free speech" arguments as cover for piracy.
If you broke a California law but the harm wasn't directed at California(a resident etc.) than California would have no jurisdiction.
I'm a Canadian and not a lawyer but given the reasoning of the decision I don't see that the US Supreme Court will have grounds to overturn this decision.
Having said that, the decision could be vacated on other grounds. Obviously since I'm not a lawyer I don't know for sure but I'm presuming that any reverse engineering is illegal in California, otherwise there is no basis for this suit since the DeCSS source was legally reverse engineered. If it isn't illegal in Illinois to reverse engineer, in other words if this case has no basis in Illinois on it's face than this court erred in not finding for Pavlovich. Test 3) of the 7 criterion which the court must use in testing if the long arm statute applies, is whether California's laws are in conflict with the sovereignty of the laws of the other state in question, in this case Illinois. If it's not illegal to reverse engineer in Illinois than it is obvious that this case is in severe and direct conflict with the laws of Illinois which would mean that the long-arm statute could not apply.
The above analysis is for some reason based on the idea that the harm in question was supposedly done from Illinois if it wasn't than simply replace Illinois with the state in question.
If I was a US citizen what would really bother me is that none of the 7 tests used by the court refer to the interests or sovereignty of the federal government. In otherwords how can it be illegal to perform an action in a part of the country when that same action isn't illegal in the total of the country. Again I'm presuming there isn't a federal US law against reverse engineering.
Those that would give up freedom for security deserve neither. Lazarus Long(aka Robert Heinlein)
is there any legal action we can take against the court in a defamation of character suit? It's obvious they have just degraded us and our cause without a viable reason.
In Singapore Members of Parliment and oposition politicians are rutinarely sued by goverment officials for doing things like expressing an opinion during a political campaign.
They go as far as to try to sue journalists in foreign countries for publishing something that is not favorable to them, but I disgress...
It is important that members of the goverment (the judiciary is part of the goverment) can carry out their duties unimpended by frivolus suits related to their work as a goverment person from the state or the public in general.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Even if one accepts that it's speech, being speech does not mean that it's suddenly immune to law, anymore than conspirators in a crime can claim that their dealings were protected by the 1st, either.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Hey, man! Don't crush his groove! Don't come down on him so hard! Don't be a square, man!
He's only following that very generation's advice -- "Never trust anyone over 30!"
You remember that generation? The ones who wanted legal drugs everywhere (and now jail people for life for that) and wanted free sex everywhere (and now extradite people across state lines for pr0n.)
The 60's generation: evil, two-faced, power-hungry sacks o' shit. Yes, 60's generation. This means you.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Are they? I've read this sentence many times, and I admit that it sounds nice. I understand the principle behind it: intellectual products are born out of a sea of free [or maybe collectively-owned] other products : what we learn at school, what we listen around, what we discuss with other people, what we read on books and on the internet. It is this pool of common knowledge that makes today science and technology possible (and music and books and many other aspect of today culture).
But then I try to apply the old rule "Do upon others ...". I believe I have the right to decide what others should do with my work. I am not talking of silly patents on general purpose ideas, but of the actual finished work, like a book, a song or a piece of software. If I decide to add it to the pool of common knowledge, I want the right that nobody can spoil my gift : this is what free software licences attempt to prevent. But I also want the right to decide to keep my work for myself, or allowing people to use it in change of money. It is un-social, it might be unethical, but I still consider it my right ( as I consider my right not to give half of my money to the beggars I meet every day).
Therefore I respect such right in others, too. I don't copy software illegaly(not a big effort today, thanks to free software people). I don't copy music illegaly (but my very limited musical needs are easily satisfied by listening to the radio). I don't pirate videos (though I'm tempted).
Sure, consumers have right, too. But they are more pressing for first-need items (instruction, food, shelter) than for products of the entartainement industry.
I also understand fair use - but I don't think it should be envorced by law, except for few exceptions. It should be enforced only by eductated consumers, via market laws.
When faced with an unfair licence, I consider as my only options either accept it or not to buy ithe item covered by such licence. If Hollywood industry decided that only blond-haired 2-meter-tall people can whatch their movies, I would consider it their right to do so, albeit I would encourage my blond 2M tall friends to boycot them. I would still consioder wrong to copy their movies to allow bald short people to watch them.
Ciao
----
FB
Michael is pissed off the court sees the concept of open source incorrectly
This is the guy that censored censorware.org
Way to be hypocritical michael.
BTW - This should be -1 by the time you read it (michael is pretty big on modding his own posts, which is also hypocritical of the "YRO" editor).
Those first three links were really interesting, and your point is well taken. The Marbury v. Madison is interesting too, but what that case was about (I'm a junior CS student, so take with tablespoons of salt) was the Supreme Court (of which Marshall was the Chief Justice). Judicial review as I understand it is the power of the Supreme Court to look at any law passed by Congress, as opposed to laws that need to be taken into account when a case comes before them.
I think the difference is that the job of the Supreme Court is to examine the constitutionality (sp?) of a case, and the laws which brought that case about, while the job of Circuit and District courts is to look at the procedural flaws (or lack thereof) in a case. Apparently (and I screwed this up) they can also question the validity of the law as well, but that's not their main purpose, whereas the Supreme Court exists to make sure citizens of the United States aren't subjected to unconstitutional laws by Congress.
Thanks for the correction, though, I should have looked it up first to be sure. Thanks!
You just come along with me and have a good time. The Galaxy's a fun place. You'll need to have this fish in your ear.
Hollywood is well-known for being where a lot of studios, actors, etc. are, but this is completely irrelevant because the only possible "injuriously affected" party in this particular case, is the company who lost its trade secret: DVD CCA.
DVD CCA is a very tiny and super-specialized part of the motion picture industry, and Yes, it happens to be in California. But since it really only deals in licensing issues and is not directly involved in any movie production, its location is not common knowledge, nor do the any of Pavlovich's answers to the lawyers questions, suggest that he knew where they were. It is purely a licensing company, and unlike the situation with movies, California is not generally known as being a licensing center.
Heck, if in late 1999 someone asked me where DVD CCA was, after blankly asking "who?" I would probably guess Japan, or maybe Delaware as the "corporate trick answer."
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The case is not about the DMCA. The DMCA is its foundation, but the case is about tort. The MPAA is suing, not trying to put him in jail. They are suing under terms of California law which a person not in California would not be expected to do.
Of course he was doing wrong things under terms of the DMCA, and surely there are laws in Indiana that provide for recovery of losses and damages. But the DMCA is federal law and this is crossing state boundaries. It should be in federal court. Alternatively the MPAA could sue him in Indiana.
The problem with having a California court conducting trial is that they will not be working with the laws that actually applied to the person they are suing. While the laws in Indiana may well be similar, the court will not be able to argue any details that may come up regarding what actually applied to a person in Indiana.
Courts are most definitely not doing their job if they are not in a position to interpret the laws as they apply (and Indiana and United States laws apply here).
So tell me why it is the MPAA cannot sue this guy in Indiana?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
There's a fundamental difference between duplicating the functionality of a driver and a unique song that you like. Do you really want the open source/free software solution applied to that?
RIAA: You can't copy our Britney Spears tunes.
RMS: (fires up karaoke machine)
...is that the 80's and 90's (particularly the Democratic Party's big lurch to the right) have brought an unusually business-friendly establishment into power.
This was fine during the fat 90's, when there was more and more to go around and nothing to pit business and the public against each other.
But now, as the market contracts and organizations fight to survive financially, "business-friendly" is going to start meaning "hostile to the public." This is going to spur a big new wave of direct liberalism from the left.
That having been said, I'm bothered by the fact that they seem to have declared him guilty, rather than just sayint that they're presuming that this would be the case IF he were guilty.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
"Why don't [they] start creating a ... p2p data storage facility, perhaps with solid crypto, where the machine's owner actually doesn't know what specific data really resides on his machine? ...Sort of like distributed FTP with crypto and voting for which file survived."
It already exists. It's called Freenet.
Unfortunately Pavlovich, like most Americans, is very America-centric. If he had thought things through he might have noted that far more movies are made in India (Bollywood) than in Hollywood, and that most computer manufacturing occurs in Taiwan or other locations in south-east Asia.
If pushed he could have admitted that there is a cultural bias suggesting that Hollywood is the source of all movies and Silicon Valley the source of all technology. But he would have been clever to follow that up with "You have identified that I am an expert witness, and as such I would have to note that I realize that California is a major player, but by no means the center of motion picture activity or technology".
I dunno, probably a decent lawyer would have trashed him no matter what he said, but it sure seems to me like he walked into that one. But then again, it must be hard to believe what they're trying is actually legal.
Never assume a conspiracy when actions can be explained by simple ignorance. These judges have lifetime appointments, and most were appointed before the public became aware of the internet. Just how do support your claim that they are 0wned?
I would have taken this offline, but your email address is unpublished here.
With all due respect, it seems you have great cause to be upset with the busybodies. People can be jerks. I can't argue with you there.
Why are you angry at God?
I don't understand why you said "God judges...not you"
I agree with that.
"There is one lawgiver and one judge." I'm not him.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Yeah, I know if it had been me, I would probably have said Hong Kong, because most of the movies I've watched in the last year have been made there.
Hardware? Beats me... maybe Sillycon Valley.
Software? Unfortunately, Redmond, Washington.
I wonder how the persecuter and judge would have reacted with answers like those.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Section 1201, (2):
No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof that --
(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or
(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
Also,
(3) As used in this subsection --
(A) to `circumvent a technological measure' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and
(B) a technological measure `effectively controls access to a work' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright holder, to gain access to the work.
: end quote :
It goes further on to detail similar constrainsts on circumventing methods that protect rights of copyright owners.
DeCSS is certainly technology. It is clearly designed for, produced for, and marketed as, a method for circumventing access protection, put in place by people who are clearly working with the authorization of the copyright holder.
If he were in a Federal court being tried for DMCA violations under that particular part, I wouldn't bet on his winning (unless that part were struck down...).
Incidentally, people who suggest that the law could be used against general-purpose things like 'dd', computers in general, or phone lines are spouting nonsense; perhaps they forget that Congressmen are people, and aren't that often blind idiots when it comes to writing laws and considering their scope. They don't have to be geeks to be intelligent, and I rarely see Slashdotters give them more credit than they would award to a 14-year-old. There are quite a few exemptions in the law, covering research, computer repair, a safe harbor for service providers, reverse engineering for interoperability, and so forth.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Hehe. ohh please. Go away.
I believe Hollywood has some better and more attainable goals for piracy protection. Mainly lobbying laws to block isp's from content it finds offense and strengthening international trade laws. Their is no way in hell that anything you described above could possibly happen.
The Supreme Court would come down quite heavily if such a decision ever occurred by the California state courts. You also need to be proved guilty and have a search warrant to obtain evidence to be prosecuted by. Its illegal for hollywood to hire bounty hunters ot hurt someone. Their bounty hunters mainly are gumshoes who send nasty letters and obtain information to RIAA/MPAA legal teams for possible civil lawsuits and not criminal ones. They want to sue and shutdown ftp sites with mp3's as well as file-swapping service companies. Not open source programmers.
Unless FBI agents find some pirated dvd stacks in linus's house which by the way needed a search warrant in the first place I may add, linus would never be charged with anything.
Remember the Sony case against emulators? It failed because there are some legal uses for it. Linux and non-profit software (not unpaid software) have existed since the dawn of the pc and will not be outlawed. I do believe the term free is bad and sounds suspicious to those untechnical but non-commerical or non-profit sounds legit and its more of the truth of most open source apps. Even before shareware most apps were actually free in the pc and academic world. It was Microsoft that changed that.
But this guy did brake the law. He put an illegal link under the DMCA (which I don't think his action should be illegal, but it is) and he is being punished for it. Think linking is legal? Go read the law. We all hate the dmca but its the law of the land and without borders due to international trade laws, weither we like it or not. It will always be the law of the land until its appealed. But Hollywood doesn't give a crap about software hobbiests. They care are bearshare and mp3 warez sites and so on. Their lawyers used the term free as in not wanting to pay to piss of some ignorant judges in this case.
http://saveie6.com/
To get himself out of his bind, Gray Davis is just going to run around arresting everyone from other states until you SEND ALL OF YOUR POWER TO CALIFORNIA. He's not kidding, and he has nothing to lose.
might be reel kewl...
would they get the message?
Kiwaiti
Member of the Legion Of Microsoft Haters
How in the hell?
california just ruled that "victims cannot sue weapons manufacturers for damages when criminals use their products illegally." in this case, isn't the DeCSS code the gun, the victim the MPAA, and the gun manufacturers the hosting company and the person that hosts the file? This case will definately set a precedent, if not for the freedom of speech/press, then for the inability of the courts to decide on the improper laws our legislative body makes up. laws go where the $$$ is, and i wonder how much the MPAA and RIAA had to pay to get that law enacted. and then i wonder if it has affected the bottom line for any musician or movie producer. if anything, i bet the musicians are still the ones getting screwed, as are the fools that go out and pay $25 to buy the newest DVD release.
on a side note, i just rented the movie snatch on dvd. it came on two "enhanced" dvds. well, each of these dvds were single sided. is the only reason to release a dvd as a two dvd set to make an extra buck? it seems that it would be real easy to make it double sided and not have to charge an extra arm and leg for it (retail for snatch is $27.95 although you can buy it for $20 on sale).
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
Sorry... Had to do it...
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
As a lawyer, it's amusing to watch Slashbots wrestle with the basics of state long arm statutes (a subject that is typically taught over the course of the first few weeks of law school). I have a memo right here on my desk prepared by a second-year law student that analyzes internet jurisdiction globally, but I can't share it because it's not mine. Suffice it to say that this is a complex area, involving many, many competing policies. Don't get too hung up on California asserting jurisidiction in this case -- it's really not that unusual and there is some good reasoning behind it.
How long, do you think, until it is illegal to remember what you watched in a movie? It is after all, quite easy to tell a friend about a movie (to sing a song, or describe a book); in essense, to make a biological copy and then transfer it to an unauthorized receipient.
- Jim
In general, what's said in a British or American court cannot be counted as libel, slander or defamation. Anyway, what's the sense in starting another court case when the existing one can be used to establish the truth of any allegations?
We should also remember - on the point of music - that the original copyright law did not include musical compositions, although, unlike computer programs, written music had been in existence nearly as long as the written word. Although I've seen nothing written as a record on the subject of music and copyright, no brilliant gems of wisdom from Jefferson, Madison, or Benjamin Franklin, the very point of its exclusion leaves the question of why. Was it deliberate, or did it merely slip beneath notice?
My personal view is that the exclusion was deliberate - that our founding fathers saw no reason to include music in copyright because music is so very much a social thing, belonging to every listener, theirs to hum or sing or modify to their own taste. I believe the men who founded the U.S. would be aghast that music could be locked under copyright law - music, more than information, demands to be free.
Don't just complain - DO something about it!
Your question raises two issues. First, how does the California court get the right to try this (civil, as opposed to criminal) case in the first place. Thats what the opinion addresses. Each state has something called a "Long Arm Statute" that allows them to get jurisdiction over people that may not be physically present in that state. For example, if I drive through California and run over someone, California's Long Arm Statute gives CA personal jurisdiction over me even if I have left the state. The fact of my driving through CA gives them that right. The question that arose in this case, as I understand it, is did the defendant have enough contact with CA to allow CA to claim jurisdiction? It looks like the CA Court of Appeals thinks there was sufficient contact between CA and the defendant.
The second issue that your question raises is, how can any judgement against the defendant be enforced outside of CA? This is an easier question in many respects. The US Constitution has a "Full Faith and Credit" clause. This allows plaintiffs to enforce the judgements of one state in any other state in the Union. Say I am found liable for damaging the person I run over while driving through CA. A court in CA enters judgement against me for $1000. The plaintiff has the right to take that CA judgement to my home state, or any other state where I have assets, and use the courts of that other state to make me pay.
Illegal use of the software that he made available is a crime, but possession of an object that *could potentially* be used for an illegal act is not illegal.
Under the DMCA it is. We've already had this discussion in the Dmitry articles... similar to the knife on desk thing. The problem is, lawmakers are getting into a trend of punishing possession of something capable of doing something illegal (eg. guns, DeCSS, Dmitry's eBook software...), rather than the actual crime itself.
I'm trying to get hold of "Noise" who runs an anonymous remailer (and spoke about it at DECON 8)- I've got a pic from DEFCON 9 for her and have lost her E-mail. Some help please?
Thanks!
P.S. Yes h ee-mail address above works but I dump SPAM like mad.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
This isn't much different from Helms Burton, where Cuban nationals can sue foreigners in US courts if they do business with Castro's Cuba that involves property they lost. Of course, if I ever received such a summons, I'd wipe a big shit smear on it and send it back (and cc. Jesse Helms with it!). It's bloody arrogant,not to mention a double standard! On the one hand America says it can sue individuals in US courts using US laws even though they are operating outside it's jurisdiction, but on the other hand they say they won't turn their citizens over to be tried by an international tribunal if they are accused of war crimes!
You're using her as bait, Master!
A guy walks into a CA hospital with a rock lodged in his head, and blames a guy in NV. NV guy says that he's never set foot in CA and the CA guy asked for the rock. Since this would be a criminal case, presumtion lies with the NV guy (innocent until guilty and all that), and baring evidence that he threw the rock in CA, would be tried in NV, not CA. However due to the diversity of the litigants, this theoretical case might qualify for federal jurisdiction. IANAL YMMV TNSTAAFL.
I'd dispute your characterization of Pavlovich's motion to quash. It's not "I don't care who I hurt, you can't touch me!" It's more along the lines of "Everything I did was in IN, why should I be forced to defend myself 1500 miles away in CA?" (Ignoring that he now lives in TX.)
Presumption of innocence is the governing spirit in jurisdiction (or at least ought to be). If you want to sue me, fine, but you need to come to me to sue me. Should a FL vacationer sue in FL courts because he slipped on a AK store's floor?
-sk
"Further; Pavlovich knew that his Web site allowed the illegal publishing and distribution of DVDs."
It is prejudicial comments like these made by the judge during the Microsoft trial that got the punishment phase rescinded. Keep it up judges! We might be able to humiliate you in addition to winning!
Looks like some of that is already happening. The Supreme voted unanimously to shove the decision back to the state court. That is a major slap in the face any time that happens!
My name fits again.
This is not the first (and most certainlly won't be the last) time that a descision has been made where it's painfully obvious that those making the decision don't even begin to comprehend the issues.
People shouldn't be allowed to pass laws or judgements without taking a test to prove they have clearly understood what is going on (I think unless they pass by 80% any judgement they then come up with be laughed at.)
I have to wonder how old the judge in this case was, i'm guessing they were over 40 years old...
GCM d+ s+:+ a- c++ U? P! L E-- W++ NM+ V PS- PE+ Y+ PGP- t 5+ X?+ R+++$ tv+ b+ DI++++ D---- G e
--
Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.
Well, well the notion that open-source people are some kind of criminal communists seems to go forward. Microsoft said it, it's un-american.
The american governement seems to be convinced, so now the next logical step in the agenda is Hollywood. It was always easy to tell who where america's baddies at a moment simply by looking a the bad guys in the movie.
So if the next hollywood movie tells about a sinister plot of open-sources hackers against civilisation/capitalism/christianity/whatever, you will know it's time to pack...
how is this the same as porn?
Okay, wait, I'm confused... I thought I understood this, and now I know I don't.
If I put up a web-site with the DeCSS code, what would I be violating? Patent law? DMCA? The speed limit as they haul me bodily across the country to California?
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
!!!GASP!!!
we have a DMCA violation here!!!
the courts have CIRCUMVENTED the jurisdiction requirements of the law which PREVENT ACCESS to the 'CRIMINAL' Material (who happen to be Free), Breaking the DMCA in order to Combat another break of the DMCA!!!!
Whatever shall be done!!!?!
ìì!
IANAL, but I think it's never been against the law to build your own cable decoder, nor to sell plans on how to build one, it's only been illegal to sell cable decoders themselves (unless you are the cable company itself, of course.)
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
This is *screwed up*. If this is allowed to stand, then it will mean that all web sites in the US will have to conform to the state laws of *every* state if they want to avoid fighting off law suits. The death of the internet as we know it. Unless we all leave the US, which is looking more and more attractive everyday. I'll stick around long enough to see what happens though.
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
Yes, I am a lawyer. No, I am not offering anyone legal advice. No, I do not currently practice law (though I do keep up). No, you most definitely may not rely on anything I say below. If you read the Court's opinion, it is clear that Court perfectly understands what is alleged to have occurred. In the context of the rest of the Court's opinion, the statement "Furthermore; Pavlovich knew that his Web site allowed the illegal publishing and distribution of DVDs," clearly means, and is functionally the same as, the more precise statement "Furthermore; Pavlovich knew that [the tools or code distributed on] his Web site allowed the illegal publishing and distribution of DVDs." If you read the Pavlovich's deposition testimony quoted in the Court's opinion, it is obvious that the Court's statement is correct.
The Court has not "decided the main issue of the case" in any binding way. The Court of Appeal did not do anything improper. On the contrary, in making the statement Michael quotes above the Court of Appeal was acting properly, and in the same manner it does in every prejudgment appeal of a trial court's determination of personal jurisdiction. I'll try to explain.
Personal jurisdiction is not determined by the mere allegations of the complaint, but by the facts. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, personal jurisdiction in California is constitutionally permissible where intentional conduct outside of California is calculated to cause injury to the plaintiff in California. See Calder v. Jones, 465 U.S. 783, 791. Thus, parties submit admissible evidence -- e.g., affidavits, declarations, deposition testimony, etc. -- and the trial court must make a preliminary, non-binding determination of what the jurisdictional facts are prior to trial -- i.e., did the defendant in fact engage in conduct outside of California that was calculated to cause injury to the plaintiff in California? The preliminary determination of the jurisdictional facts is made by the trial judge and is NOT binding on the jury at trial. Where, as here, the defendant seeks an appeal (actually a petition for writ of mandamus) of the jurisdictional issue in order to get the case dismissed prior to trial, the Court of Appeal must necessarily review the trial court's (i.e., trial judge's) determination of the jurisdictional facts. Again, neither the factual determination by the Court of Appeal nor by the trial court is binding on the jury at trial. Indeed, said determinations are not even admissible as evidence at trial. The defendant starts the jury trial with an evidentiary clean slate.
Why is it done this way? For two reasons. First, to give the defendant a pre-trial opportunity to seek dismissal of the Complaint for lack of personal jurisdiction. Secondly, this procedure avoids what many on Slashdot might think of as an endless loop where: (a) you can't have a trial without first establishing personal jurisdiction over the defendant; but (b) you can't establish personal jurisdiction over the defendant until you determine what the facts are.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
I think the point he was making with the reference to Marbury v. Madison is that the constitution does not give any special role to the Supreme Court with respect to considering the constitutionality of laws. That has arisen from case law, specifically Marbury v. Madison.
For that reason you are mistaken in saying that it is "the" job of the Supreme Court to examine constitutionality of laws. Their job continues to be to serve as the highest court of appeal, just as it was before Marbury v. Madison.
It is considered to be implicit (following Marbury v. Madison, before that it would have been controvertial to say the least) that the courts do not enforce laws that are not valid under the consitution. As you note, it isn't only the Supreme Court that that applies to.
dude
.. why pay for something which you can get for free and next to no risk of consequences?
they DONT want to pay for information. remember how many people said they wouldn't pay a dime for napster, and would just go get their mp3s elsewhere? it's not just open source enthusiasts, I think it applies to people in general
BilldaCat
I just moved back to Chicago after living in San Francisco for a year, and I really believe that about 20% of the tech professionals know what they're doing out there and they fight to hold everything together in spite of the 80% who stumble through their work.
While that's a bit offtopic, I do have a point. I found that many, many "professionals" tend to assume they know what they're doing with a minimum of information, much less familiarity with a given technology or product. It seems to me that the problem extends to the legal system. Some judge thinks that because he can open a Word document all on his own (and get keen virus to show to his judge friends) he knows what there is to know about the computer industry. It makes me mad, as a person with a strong desire to do my work correctly and efficiently. Maybe work ethic is too "old school"? *sigh*
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
In A.D. 2001 ...
DeCSS Case was beginning
Pavlovich: What happen ?
Lawyer: Someone set up you the lawsuit
Balif: We get justice !
Pavlovich: What !
Balif: All rise !
Pavlovich: It's you !
Judge: How are you pirate ring !!
Judge: All your bail are belong to us !
Judge: You are on your way to sentencing !
Pavlovich: What you say !!
Judge: You have no chance for appeal make your plea
Judge: HA HA HA HA
Pavlovich: Take off every 'open source'
Pavlovich: You know what you doing
Pavlocich: Move 'open source'
Pavlovich: For great decoding.
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
I used to argue that as well, until someone else told me that the blank DVDs that you buy apparently have the "key" portion of the disk made unusable. Also, last I heard, the burnable DVD media is significantly smaller than the commercially pressed DVD media, which means you'd have to either reduce the size of the copy or split it across multiple DVDs (both of which would require decoding it, first). Another poster has already pointed out the DVD rip->DivX issue, which is also worth considering. While there are alternatives (such as video out on the DVD player to video in on a video capture card), DeCSS makes it faster, easier, higher quality, and cheaper. Remember that piracy isn't just about being able to make copies -- it's about being able to make copies cheaply. Overall, DeCSS can (and almost certainly does) assist in pirating DVDs. However, the important issue is that it's not exclusively a pirate tool, any more than a port scanner is exclusively a cracker tool.
This is the real crux of the issue. The court is rather illegally overextending its jurisdiction. I have every confidence that the Supreme Court is going to lay the proverbial smack down on this decision, as judges really aren't stupid, there are just some that are exceedingly ignorant or biased (welcome to America, where our system is _designed_ to allow an individual representative of government to what he feels is right, even if it goes against everybody else... it's a feature, not a bug)
The absolute best case scenario is going to be knocking down the trial in California and having someone bring up the charges in Indiana. This is highly inconvenient for Pavlovich, as he lives in Texas now, but would be required to show for trial in ?Chicago? (not familiar where the court for my area is).
From the ruling, the problematic section of text: "The question in this case is whether California's long-arm statute reaches owners, publishers of those Web sites when, in violation of California law, they make available for copy or distribution trade secrets or copyrighted material of California companies. We hold it does." (Page 4). The whole ruling reads as a fan-boy decision in favor of California's Great Movie and Computer Industries. It also lists off some rather, uh, disparate, "related" cases.
Anyway, I said it before, and I'll say it again: I have every confidence that the Supreme Court will tell the California court they can't do this. This is America, where our system is _designed_ to allow an individual representative of government to what he feels is right, even if it goes against everybody else... it's a feature, not a bug!
Man you have a lot of faith in the supreme court. After what they did in the last election nothing they did would suprise me again.
War is necrophilia.
It's being done. Professor Felten (who wrote the paper on SDMI for an Information Hiding workshop) and the EFF are suing the RIAA. The RIAA are trying to get this dismissed, as it is exactly the kind of lawsuit they don't want. It's all very well to sue members of the "evil Open Source movement", or for that matter nasty hackers, but a professor at MIT is a different matter.
What are the odds of this issue working its way up to the Supreme Court? To me, it seems pretty likely - conflicting rulings all over the place, our liberties at stake...
what needs to be done is, should it reach the Supreme Court, someone to write an Amicus Curiae brief, informing the judges there of the facts about Open Source and what exactly DeCSS does. If we've got morons sitting on the bench who think that it's really a criminal action to decode DVD's, then our civil liberties are in severe danger.
Kat -- Alcohol and calculus don't mix. Never drink and derive.
Ok, first of all, let's get through the lie that this guy had no idea what DeCSS did when he posted it on his website. Unless he was just a reactionary sheep who mirrors stuff whenever Slashdot tells him to, he had a pretty good idea of what DeCSS could do and why other website operators were having it taken down by the MPAA. He knew what he was doing.
Ok, fine, a law somewhere was broken. No arguments there...
Secondly, the court did the right thing in declaring his actions illegal. It is not the job of the courts to make the laws (as any first year poli-sci major, or, for that matter, almost anyone who's taken US History will tell you). The job of the courts is to enforce the laws, and under the DMCA, the actions of Mr. Pavlovich were unquestionably illegal.
Not really. The defendant committed a crime according to laws in California, outside the borders of the State of California. So whether his actions are illegal in California or not, he cannot be tried there. That's like giving all returning US residents from Holland a blood test, and arresting anyone with Cannabis metabolites in their blood. If you travel to another country, and commit a crime, expect to be tried there and abide by local law (there are Canadians on death row, we have never had a death penalty, but they chose to murder in jurisdictions that do).
I'm sorry, but we have yet to give California power to exercise the law all over the world, and even your own US constitution is supposed to protect you from this kind of crap, isn't it??
And I have to say I agree that if you wish to protest unjust laws by breaking them, go ahead, but expect to be tried for it. I believe that's why you have an appeals court and supreme court to 'test' the validity of current laws, and occaisionally, go against them.
I personally believe that laws prohibiting the injestion of certain chemicals are unjust, but I don't walk into police stations and across border crossings carrying them, because I know that the 'reward' for my protest will not be worth trying to swing the tide of public opinion in my favour.
-- If at first you do succeed, try to hide your astonishment. -- Harry F. Banks
ahh, and when was the last time you wrote a best selling CD? When was the last time you wrote a song that generated millions of dollars in revenue? Let me guess, the answer is never, right? Do you know how much time and money is spent in the recording process? Let me guess again. No you don't. Next you'll tell everyone that books demand to be free. Hey, anyone can modify Shakespear if they want, he wasn't that important. Reading is just a social thing. The same thing with the Founding fathers, heck they just wrote the Constitution for social readings. "My personal view is that the exclusion was deliberate - that our founding fathers saw no reason to include music in copyright because music is so very much a social thing, belonging to every listener, theirs to hum or sing or modify to their own taste." Well, since they didn't have Napster or CD's back then maybe they didn't think of the issue. And, BTW, sheet music has a long history of copywrite protection. Slee Get bent
It gets a lot worse...
:)
."
The Long Long Arm of the Low
Basically in this case, the judge applied the "effects test" set forth in the Supreme Court case Calder v. Jones, 465 U.S. 783 (1984)(reporter and editor, both Florida residents, were subject to personal jurisdiction in California for a defamatory article they had written in a national magazine about Shirley Jones, who lived and worked in California, on the grounds that the allegedly tortious actions were "expressly aimed at California")
The reasononing is, if the defandants actions are not "random, fortuitous, or attenuated" the court reasons they can exercise it's jurisdiction.
In Pavlovich's case, he was guiltly of targeting California because he held the common knowledge that the major studios are located in Holywood, and that Silicon Valley is considered to be a software and hardware center.
Have fun reading the rest...
"Q. . . . Are you aware -- do you have any understanding where the major motion pictures studios [sic] are located?
"A. [by Pavlovich]. By 'major' I'm just going to go out on a limb here in that you mean some of the larger motion picture producers or production companies.
"Q. That's correct. The sort of plaintiffs that were the plaintiffs in the matter that you were just an expert witness in.
"A. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, they make a lot of movies in California, Hollywood, yeah.
"Q. Right. So what's your understanding of the term 'Hollywood'?
"A. Hollywood is the big area in California where they make a lot of movies and a lot of movie stars live and whatnot.
"Q. Is it fair to say that Hollywood, California is the center of the motion picture industry?
"A. I wouldn't know. Whether or not like all their offices and buildings are there, I don't know specifically, but I guess the general common idea is that Hollywood is the area for that . . .
As to California's dominance in the computer industry, Pavlovich testified in the same deposition, as follows:
"Q. Do you have any understanding of whether or not a significant number of hardware manufacturers are located in California?
"A. [by Pavlovich]. I believe . . . there is a lot of technology companies out in California . . . . Yeah, there's several hardware manufacturers located in California.
"Q. Have you ever heard of Silicon Valley?
"A. Yes.
"Q. What does that refer to?
"A. That's an area where there is a lot of technology-related companies, software writers, hardware manufacturers, programmers.
"Q. And that's in California; is that correct?
"A. Yes.
"Q. Based on your expertise in the computer industry, is there another state besides California that you could name has more or a higher concentration of hardware manufacturers?
"A. I don't know the exact numbers that are in the Silicon Valley. You know, I do know there is a lot now in Texas. We have got the Silicon Triangle is what we call it. There's three major cities in Texas with a lot of technology and telecommunications companies. Whether or not - I don't know the numbers between the areas, but there is a lot of technology hot spots around the world.
"Q. What would you describe as the top three technology hot spots in the United States?
"A. Silicon Valley, Texas, and - I have no idea where I'd get the third one from.
"Q. And as far as - for lack of a better term, hot spot of technology, is Silicon Valley - it's your understanding that Silicon Valley is such a hot spot of technology with respect to hardware or software and programmers? Is that the things you identified before; is that correct?
"A. Yeah."
Because Pavlovich knew that California is commonly known as the center of the movie industry, and knew that Silicon Valley in California is one of the top three technology "hot spots" in the country, he knew, or should have known, that the DVD republishing and distribution activities he was illegally doing and allowing to be done through the use of his Web site, while benefiting him, were injuriously affecting the motion picture and computer industries in California. The question is whether Pavlovich's lack of physical and personal presence in California incapacitates California courts from jurisdictionally reaching him through its long-arm statute. We hold it does not.
Instant access provided by the Internet is the functional equivalent of personal presence of the person posting the material on the Web at the place from which the posted material is accessed and appropriated. It is as if the poster is instantaneously present in different places at the same time, and simultaneously delivering his material at those different places. In a sense, therefore, the reach of the Internet is also the reach of the extension of the poster's presence.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
So when my flatulence kills a butterfly which was stabilizing airflow.... etc, etc... that allows people to decrypt DVDs^H^H^H^H"protected content", i can be prosecuted in California courts. Maybe I should hold it until I get home...
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
Hmph. Eric Raymond, I, RMS, and Bruce Perens are all over 40 years old. Many of the most basic RFCs are over twenty years old and were written by twenty-somethings (do the math). OSI's lawyer, Larry Rosen, was a programmer before he was a lawyer, and he could just as likely be a judge as a lawyer. Eric Raymond's wife is angling for a judgeship, and she's over 40. And anybody over 40 likely has net-savvy children. So age is no barrier to having a clue.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
How can that be when finances mean the difference between access and inaccessibility in so many cases? Isn't "cost" a form of restraint? Free from cost and freedom are different. Maybe it was just the wording/use of "restraint" I take exception to.
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
oops, make that use a piece of software illegally. sorry for the bad english.
Got Freedom?
Thinking?
But doesn't the DMCA cover "devices" and not "speech"? Since when is DeCSS a device?
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
have them watch the movie anti-trust! They'll soon see that Open Source isn't a bad thing, in fact, it's a super-hero!
-PYves
Increasingly, the answer of the old boys network that runs America is to use the court system they run to throw tech professionals in jail, for trivial offenses. While you may not post DeCSS, other legitimate things you do in the course of sysadmin, security audits, app development, whatever, are increasingly going to be bordering on civil and *criminal* offenses.
Look at the Khafka-esque persecution of Skylarov, Randall L. Schwartz and others. This is the Spanish Inquisition, USA circa 2001. This is getting to be like McCarthism, and rapidly so. How about that dude in Georgia who is facing 20 years for using spare cycles to crunch numbers in a university lab?
If you are hanging out on slashdot, you may know enough to be a "suspect." Just being here may make you a suspect. Suspect of what? In this era, it doesn't seem much to matter.
If you support links to DeCSS as being legal, then you must also support links to child pron sites as being legal. Or are you a hypocrite?
Sorry to interrupt with a fact: You need DeCSS (or any other 'unauthorized' DVD decription scheme) to convert DVD movies to more easily distributable formats (like DiVX, the hacked Microsoft MPEG4 codec). DVD burners are still $$$ (at least the media is), but blank CD's are cheap.
DiVX movies ripped from DVDs are pirated by the truckload, check with any media sharing P2P program (e.g. WinMX).
- Andreas
I'm not at all surprised that judges think that open source enthusiasts are pirates; Think about the rallying cry, "Information wants to be free!"
To the non-technical audience, that means "I don't want to pay for my information!"
You're right. Perhaps we should consider changing the phrase slightly.
"Information seeks freedom"?
"Information wants to be freed"?
"Information wants liberty"?
These are much harder to misunderstand, albiet not as aesthetic as the original to those of us who understand it.
Comments?
One of the major problems the open source community has is its approach to defending its position and attempting to publicise itself is we can drone all day about how our products are free-as-in-GPL, and how much open sourced products help the user community, but the majority of judges and lawyers involved still won't know what all that means. Try explaining the difference between beer-free and opensource-free and you get a lot of eyes glazing over.
Secondly, many many lower court Judges have already been pre-conditioned by the media to automatically connect words like 'coder' and 'free software' with 'hacker' and 'piracy'. With Open Source not even being close to mainstream these days, they'll likely never know the truth without being part of the community. Compared to all the Joe Everymans out there, we make up a small minority. What people need to see are more win32 and macOS open source applications that they will use and understand.
Thirdly, the open sourced community has taken a strange legal approach in my point of view. With an ideal that is directly counter to most of the corporate world's ideology, Open Source needs to do more than fight the challenges are thrown at them with DMCA and DeCSS trials, We honestly need someone who can find a test case to bring to court that is so black and white under the law that the courts have to rule in our favour. Open Source has very few established precedents compared to Software Piracy and Malicious Hacking cases.
I may not have a Law degree, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
Ice Cream has no bones.
Tell you what, call GWB and ask him to exercise a bit of Texan jurisDICKtion over those damn californicators.
What gets me are the venomous tones they use. They speak angrily about subject matter that don't seem to have much of a grasp upon at all. Kind of a mindless and flailing quality to it. An embarassment to the US judicial system.
There is no remotely possible way an honest judge could have reached the conclusions he/she did
One way.
Idiots can be honest
This begs an interesting question. What is the governmental motivation to prevent us from copying Xerox's printer driver if in fact it will be duplicated by open source advocates. As the goal of copyright is to encourage innovation by rewarding those who create it seems it is no longer working. For one if open source people are willing to create said driver/OS/whatever without the protection of copyright then it appears the incentive is no longer needed. In addition should the day ever come when open source software is a real competitor to the closed source software then the incentive is gone as well b/c who will purchase a product that costs money when they can buy one that does it for free. In this case copyright is merely forcing us to do duplicate work.
We should realize that copyright/patent laws are not inalienable rights but rather privleges granted to encourage innovation and thereby total utility. The current effect of copyright in the computer world is to force the same type of software to be written over and over rather than merely once and reused. A possible solution to this issue is to require software to be patented ( instead of copyrighted) only for a short term of 3-5 years and as a condition of said patent readable source code to be made availible (just like with normal patents the way the device works must be made availible as a condition of granting the patent). There would still be a significant incentive to create computer products but unnatural monopolies based on standards control would have a harder time flourishing in addition to the clear benifit of more free software around.
In terms of music and britney spears we should ask the same question. Does the utility associated with the incentive to produce music outweigh the clear disutility of not being able to freely trade and listen to music? I think the answer in this case is no. If Britney got no royalty money off CDs being a pop star would still be financially advantageous enough to her and to her backers for her to continue producing music. The money from concerts alone would make a profit.
In fact given the huge number of bands that exist and play without money from CDs and the fact that many very popular bands start this way with little hope (at their inception) of achieving a hit single we should assume that the copyright protection in music is a fairly minor incentive. Given this analysis it is highly reasonable that we should be able to freely take music (although this analysis would probably not apply to books or other non-performed material).
Finaly about the point of "freeing other peoples work without their consent" I would point out again that their is no inherint right to control your intellectual property. Unlike regular property when someone else uses your IP nothing is taken from you. In fact copyright laws take freedoms away from society as a whole in return for the promise of greater productivity. If this promise is not met then we should abolish copyright laws int hat area.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
That's an interesting thought, and not necessarily one that would occur to the defense attourney(s). I wonder how one could let them know this option?
The entire court ruling is dealing with that issue. A court must have "personal jurisdiction" over a defendant to hear a case. The main requirement to have personal jurisdiction over someone is that the defendant must have had minimum contacts with the state. The level of minimum contacts has been very hard to determine in the age of the Internet.
The court decided that the defendant knew that his actions would hurt someone in California (the huge tirade about where Hollywood is). By putting the DeCSS code on the net, the defendant broke California law, and could be prosecuted.
The California judicial system can enforce its ruling by getting Texas or Illonois to enforce it. The States have to give "full faith and confidence" to other states judicial rulings.
Come play Heroes of Might and Magic Mini online.
heh.. dont even trust clicking urls anymore.. just copy and paste them into a terminal use links or lynx to view them.
The implications of this are just a reiteration on a small scale of the issues raised by the equivalent international agreements: Those who desire to restrict access to information are trying to leverage their control of local law-making bodies into the capacity for universal enforcement, because in a wired world if they can't enforce it everywhere, they can't enforce it at all.
Once upon a time, if you didn't like the way your local power structure ran things, you could leave. In some cases that might be very difficult, but it was always possible. Under "Universal Enforcability", everything on the Internet is theoretically subject to the *most* restrictive laws that can be found anywhere else on the internet.
The logical consequences have been pointed out before: Political speech of all but the blandest sort would be almost impossible, because between them virtually every possible ideology is deeply offensive or threatening in at least *one* nation on the planet. If US laws on pornography apply to the world then websites in Denmark (where 17 year-olds can legally be displayed, that's child porn in the US) have to be shut down. But if US laws apply, then so do Saudi Arabian laws, and even bikini "cheesecake" pinups are illegal. If French and German laws about display of a swastika apply, then so so those of Singapore, where "flipping the bird" at someone is potential jail time.
The alternative is that the laws of the most *permissive* jurisdiction apply, which would in practice mean everything was allowed (which is what we've gotten used to). That's unacceptable to those that would control what people would see and know.
In the long run, I'm pretty sure we're screwed. I don't see a meaningful stopping point on the slippery slope, and "Everything is permitted" will *not* be tolerated world-wide when you get to extreme cases like kiddie-porn and the manufacturing process for Sarin. Once you draw the line, it will keep sliding downhill until your only hope to stay out of prison is to either provide no information, or hope you never get noticed by a jurisdiction that thinks that those pictures of your girlfriend are obscene because she's wearing shorts and a halter-top. Oh, and you're a girl, too.
Of course, when studio execs are being hauled into foreign courts for violating local speech restrictions, they might start to think this precedent isn't such a great thing. But right now, they are spending a lot of money trying to cut their own throats.
--Dave Rickey
It's already happened. Die Hard had a bad-guy computer geek; so did Jurrasic Park. So did The Net. As did Universal Soldier II. etc. etc. etc.
The computer geek is usually portrayed as a bad guy. Rarely as the main bad guy, of course, but usually as *a* bad guy.
And if you think this hasn't affected these court decisions, you need to cut back on the crack.
... as the New Hampshire license plates put it.
Most Americans like to think they understand what "free" means in that usage what's so hard about to understand about "freedom" when it comes to speech, ideas and technological development?
So, this begs the question: did Pavlovich actually republish or distribute DVDs, or just DeCSS? The court seems to think he was actively pirating movies with his buddies.
How the hell he injuriously affects the computer industry is an open question...
"Pavlovich cannot claim innocent intent ... Pavlovich knew ... that by posting the misappropriated information on the Internet, he was making the information available to ... users ... including users in California" (page 11)
Wow. This is getting a bit excessive. My understanding is that the Trade Secret information was misappropriated by someone else, which is how it got into his hands. The fact the Internet just happens to extend into California is unfortunate.
I can't wait for judges in the bible belt to start shutting down porn sites based on the fact that "making these sinful images is illegal, and by doing it via the Internet, those images are made available to users in "
sigh. this is getting more and more saddening as i read it.
http://www.nolo.com/encyclopedia/articles/ilaw/squ abbles.html
The criteria courts follow to determine state jurisdiction. Seems to me that the 'injury' clause would be what they are using here.
This is justification of forum shopping, at it's worse!
Fight Spammers!
Most companies are slowly coming around to the idea that selling things to people is a dead-end. What's FAR more profitable is never selling anything- just loaning your property out to people.
Microsoft's biggest challenge right now is simply how to make money off of Office. Office worked great 5 years ago, and I'm still using my copy from that time. How does Microsoft get my money, then? They can't do it by improving Office- Office is *done*. The answer? Make me pay even though nothing has been improved. Make me pay even if I never upgrade my work machine.
The subscription model. It's a train that even companies selling physical objects got onto long ago. A unnamed company that I recently talked to offered me an improved method for packing the merchandise I ship. I requested further information, and it turned out that they never sell anything- they rent the machine that seals the packing units, and the materials that they work with. The monthly rent was pretty high, and one could never own the equipment. This struck me as a remarkably forward-looking and stable business plan. They aren't required to win the customer's trust and approval all over again every year.
Who can blame businesses if they want to get onto this train?
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Likewise, legal use of firearms while exercising one's RIGHT TO SELF-DEFENSE "... results in severe physical and emotional trauma, and often in death" particularly when defending yourself against violent criminal assault (e.g. home invasion, car jacking, rape, convenience store hold-up, etc). The victim, even after killing the assailant, will often suffer Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
Of course, I would rather suffer PTSD having shot a criminal DEAD than be beat to death with a baseball bat by that same criminal.
I believe Juanita
Lastly, as anyone who is familiar with the actions and works of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or Thoreau knows, civil disobedience does not come without a price. If you aren't willing to take the punishment for standing up against unjust laws, then you really shouldn't be breaking the law in the first place. You cannot have your cake and eat it too.
Civil disobedience has absolutely nothing to do with martyrdom. It may be an effective addition, but it isn't necessary.
Pavlovich broke an unjust law, I see nothing wrong with him trying to avoid punishment. Gandhi is not the be all and end all of civil disobedience.
If we keep this legislative crap up in America, Open Source anything is going to outsource to to other contries and leave America out in the cold. One day open source projects will become very mainstream and America will be just too late. We'll all be paying the Microsoft, RIAA AOL-Time-Warner taxes for everything. I'm a beliver in free market, but this legislative garbage to force out competion to gain more power (and that's what it's about folks, it not just money, but control) is out of check. Too many special intrests and cozing up money. The MegaCorps are hear. We are slowly entering the 'cyberpunk age' people. Count on it.
Righteous BOfH with a finger on The Switch Janir - Power Co. Sysadmin in need of Recovery
Its getting to the point where, ethically speaking, its time to start encouraging people to lie, cheat and steal everything not nailed down that they can get away with. I mean, why not? Companies are doing it, the courts are helping them, individuals may as wel go along with it.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
If any linux leaders or opensource guru's want to apply for a non technical advisor please do so with the link above. This would clear up the free software does not equal pirated software. I like the idea of coining the phrase non-profit software because it sounds better. Anyway we need someone who has a phd and is knowledgable in free software in the Santa Clara area.
hmm Doesn't linus have a PHD, is involved in free software development, and live in the area? I wonder if the court could pay him for his time. I know its alot to ask but as I see it, free software could be in alot of trouble depending on the outcome of this case. For example if the court mentions something about free software users being pirates, lawyers from Microsoft could use this to sue memebers of SAMBA and the MONO project.
http://saveie6.com/
that Humanity is uniquely unqualified to rule itself.
Corporations elect Politicians;
Politicians appoint Judges.
Judges favor corporate issues.
We've got two parties, two tribes, good and evil, black and white, left and right, conservative and liberal, republican and democrat, penis and vagina.
We fight, The Man relaxes in the big chair. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
I hate to say it, but what the hell did the guy expect? Everyone knows that if you make that DeCSS code publically available, you're in for a world of hurt from the MPAA or various powerful companies with stake in the DVD Market, and you're especially vulnerable if you live in the US, who's judicial system does nothing to help the little guys.
Ok, then let's arrest everyone who had something to do with this!!! Let's see....there is his ISP (Those evil pirates) who allowed him to post it on his website. Then there is the local POTS carrier. How dare they let such things get seen by joe user. And let's not forget those DAMN companies who supplied the backbone, the DNS that pointed them to it, the router manufacturer who obviously built their equipment to help that hacker pirate his DVD movies. Don't even get me started about parents! They didn't teach their little darling that playing a DVD movie on Linux was WRONG!.....I'm sorry what was I saying again?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
People who think that Free Software doesn't have a cost/payment associated with it, don't understand Free Software.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Let me get this straight. You think that me here in Texas should have to worry that a fictional story dipicting criminal acts in Cambodia justify Cambodian officials dragging my ass there and executing me for treason is justifiable? I live in Texas for a reason. I don't like California laws. But now it doesn't matter because their jurisdiction is apparently over me.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
Surrounded by many country-folk in Cornwall you say? Well I never!
Tell me, have you noticed if they eat pasties as well? I just hate that!
-END SARCASTIC MESSAGE-
I remember the early days of the WWW when anonymous servers were easy to find and were pretty much uncrackable. The original one in Finland shut down for reasons I can't remember. And some guys are currently setting up a data holding site on a "country" off of the British coast.
Why don't some of the open source advocates start creating a Gnutella-like p2p data storage facility, perhaps with solid crypto, where the machine's owner actually doesn't know what specific data really resides on his machine? Seems like if enough folks opted in with a small chunk of their hard drive, we could prevent things like DeCSS, RIASS/Napster, Dolby AC3, etc. from happening in the first place.
Additions and deletions could even be by mass vote where the stuff wasn't stored permanently (or was quickly deleted) if enough folks didn't agree it was important. Sort of like distributed FTP with crypto and voting for which files survived.
Or is it starting to look like the Technology enthusiast will one day be chased down in a witch-hunt type of fashion?
Case 1
Joe's computer crashes one night, and he immediately thinks of his computer literate neighbor, John, with whom he does not get along. It's then realizes that obviously he's been hacked and John should be arrested.
Case 2
Teacher Smith's system is suddenly missing some files inexplicably, and the little brainstar in the corner is actually a little peculiar this morning. To the principal's office he goes.
Case 3
A mother can't figure out how to send an e-mail, so she calls and harasses her son.
Oh, wait, this is already happening, isn't it?
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
You think Cornwall's bad? You should try living in Burnham-On-Crouch in Essex: inbred zombies that can barely string two words together let alone read and write invaded in the summer every weekend by Timothys and Lucindas in Porches and Range Rovers who stand about in bars all day talking about their yachts...
Read the ruling, and you notice about three pages of California marketing.
"Because Pavlovich know that California is commonly known as the center of the movie industry, and knew that Silicon Valley in California is one of the top three technology "hot spots" in the country, he knew, or should have known, that the DVD republishing and distribution activities he was illegally doing and allowing to be done through the use of his Web site, while benefiting him, were injuriously affecting the motion picture and computer industries in California." p.10 of th 15 page ruling.
What?!?!!? That reads like a "Virginia is for lovers" marketing brochure. The most frightening phrase in that paragraph above in "or should have known". Are our courts set up to decide what a person should or shouldn't know?
------ Tim O'Brien
Your e-mail relative to the case entitled Pavlovich v. Superior Court (H021961), has been received. Your comments about this court's decision in said case are well taken. However, you may want to send your comments about their need for an unbiased technical advisor by letter to the Santa Clara County Superior Court at 191 North First Street, San Jose, CA 95113. I suggested writing a letter because I don't believe they have a website at this time. Very truly yours, Willy Magsaysay Senior Deputy Clerk I'm all out of stamps, someone send a letter for me.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Right, and therefore fewer consumers buy the product, which hurts the big corporation. Do you think that tobacco companies don't try to fight the huge taxes on cigarettes? Or do you think they're wasting their money by doing this?
It doesn't matter if you apply the tax to the business or the consumer, either way it hurts both.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
Once I believed in justice and righteousness, but I learned the hard way. I used to tell companies when I spotted security vulnerabilities in their software, but the only answer I got was an angry voice or a threat. The answer didn't come quickly, probably because I wasn't smart enough; but finally I learned just to exploit those vulnerabilities. I must be doing the right thing now because nobody is yelling to me anymore..
"Kill the messenger" attidute is very helpfull; this is how we all learn to become evil hax0rs. When you spot a bug, defect, vulnerability or any security problem in commercial software DO NOT report it. You only get in trouble. Best way is to exploit the vulnerability as well as you can and share it with your friends. Or atleast that is the message court is sending to public.
Fortunately with the IBM situation, IBM was honorable in dealing with the Compaq folks when they reverse engineered the bios. There were several other companies that outright copied the IBM bios, and IBM did lay the smackdown upon them.
Although, if the DVD-CCA were so concerned about those "evil pirates" breaking into their DVDs, why didn't they patent their 1337 encryption/decryption scheme and sue DeCSS people for patent violations? Instead, we've got the weak trade secret violation claim, which nearly any IP lawyer should tell you that trade secret claims are null and void in the event of reverse engineering.
If god had intended you to be naked, you would have been born that way.
International law is like a playground where kids tell each other to do things, and then those so exhorted say "Oh yeah? Make me!" At best, it's favor-trading.
The executives so pushing are really banking on the current US position of international superiority.
A US studio executive will never be hauled into a foreign court. EVER. If such a circumstance came about, the US would scream bloody murder about sovereignty, jurisdiction, and what have you. However, if a citizen of another country breaks US law, the US then waves the flag of international cooperation. That's why things like the oft-mentioned Hague treaty on harmonizing international enforcement are so interesting- seeng through the glass of the playground, such initiatives are always one more powerful country trying to cow the others. You can be sure that if someone with enough money is bothered in the US, nothing will happen to them. Now, the US may offer up sacrificial lambs of less-powerful folks from time to time, which they couldn't give a damn about anyway, just so the US can enjoy the privilege of busting foreigners.
If the Saudis don't like US concepts of obscenity, tough. They can firewall off all non-Saudi sites. But if we don't like a site in Saudi Arabia, we'll go over there and give them cash to smash the writer, which they will happily do.
It's a Catch-22, and in a Catch-22, the side with the most power wins. There are no rules, really.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Without the tax, they could have charged 1.07 themselves, and made more money.
if i recall correctly (which i do) a whole microindustry of incredibly gifted assembler programmers grew out of the tendancy of groups to release small "demos" with their cracks or installers. not to mention the art and music scenes. i think many "fanboys" who were into the scene "back in the day" (if you'll permit me the bland reference) are making a positive contribution to the current state of technology.
fishfuicekr.
this is, of course, in stead of posting pithy little comments on slashdot.
guilty as charged.
Whether or not you agree ro disagree with what is going on, statements like this are ridiculous. Of course he knew that DeCSS could be used to pirate DVDs. That has been the arguement from the very begining, and to claim he had no idea that DeCSS could be used for something like that just makes you (and him) look foolish. If you want to argue that he was not posting DeCSS for that primary purpose, that is a legitimate arguement. But to claim he had no idea you could use DeCSS that way is just plain stupid.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Now, RMS can make up his own song that uses the same title as a Britney Spears song...
Thanks to the MPAA and courts for sorting out who's fit to be warden and the rest are prisoners.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I was blamed for every computer mishap in one of the labs back in High School. I was even banned because the cmos batteries died and some of the computers lost their setup passwords. And they wonder why I hated school.
The U.S. Federal courts were explicitly created to deal with cases dealing with residents of different states, amoung other things.
So the California courts are stepping on the federal courts jurisdiction, for one thing. Additionally, the California judge just gave clear evidence of bias and prejudgument, which is grounds for declaring a mistrial and starting over with a different judge.
I was under the impression that if a trade secret is revealed by reverse engineering, it loses trade secret protection. Where would we be today if IBM had claimed that the PC BIOS was a trade secret?
Yes, the nick is flamebait
Maybe a couple days ago? I'm sure we'll all survive somehow.
Just one more reason to kick California out of the union I say.
That state is the home of the RIAA and MPAA, has a long history of brain dead judicial rulings, sucks up every last drop of the water resources and electrical power available in the western part of the continent. It brought us the dot com boom & bust, gang warfare, Ronald Reagan, Gary Condit, lousy movies and music, and wave after wave of crappy culture (surfer, beatnick, hippie, muscle/fitness, gang, etc.)
And what good has come out of California? Lots of fruits & vegetables and the origin of the computer industry. That's about it.
Under DMCA, one can be legally attacked for creating a device that might be used to break the law (outside of DMCA itself) by violating copyrights. Winners: Big corporations. Losers: Individuals and small companies.
At the same time, gun owners are working at, and succeeding in, making themselves exempt from liability for creating devices that may and are used to break the law. Winners: Big corporations. Losers: Small guys.
Copyright violation via "circumvention devices" may cost a content owner some revenue. (And to that, it's been argued that some violations may indirectly INCREASE revenue, e.g. Napster's influence on CD sales.)
Illegal use of firearms results in severe physical and emotional trauma, and often in death.
The big corporations have a monopoly on both IP and on immunity.
Well, it was more succinct in my head this morning when I was still bright-eyed, but you get the drift.
An in order to do this, they tried to get Pavlovich to concede that California is the center of the computing industry. That is arrogance, considering that softwaremag rankings show only 2 California corporations in the top 10 of software, together scoring less that 13% of the revenue. (This is a software matter, right? DeCSS is not hardware..) Pavlovich & counsel screwed up by not being ready for this pitch that the world revolves around California.
Apparently, the state's judiciary has bought in to the delusion as well.
What the attorney is saying is that there is sufficient contact with California to give jurisdiction. Long-arm statutes haven't caught up to the Internet yet.
As well you should be. Facts are the anti-Slashdot.
Sales tax does not affect big corporations. The tax is passed on to the consumer. That's why when you buy something for 99 cents, it costs $1.07
Psst...remember to check the other topics when posting stories... http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/08/024423 3
Despite the fact that this ruling is completely contrary to the Constitution's exclusion of interstate powers from the states, this is going to be tough to fight.
Judges by and large are VERY egotistical creatures, and they are not very likely to ever, even in a clear cut case, to ever ask the plantiff "why are we here, what gives this court jurisdiction?". This precedent, had it been ruled on properly, would have limited the power of the state judiciary.
The "eevil hacker" talk is only cover.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
Play with fire, you get burned.
Anyone who made this available to the public had to know they were taking a risk. Whether it is right or not, they should've known they stood the chance to be dragged to court for this. If he's not prepared to fight that battle, he shouldn't have gotten involved in the first place.
BilldaCat
As I understand our current legal system (and ass well our entire Republic) There is a Federal level of government at the top of our Heirarchy. Followed by individual states and then by local city governments. The Federal branch can trickle down it's laws onto the states and the states down to the city level but, as I understand it. A state cannot tell another state what laws it can and cannot abide by (Living in Texas I enjoy being able to make a right turn at a red light but would get into a bit of trouble, say, in lousiana where it isn't legal AFAIK) How is the California judicial system propose it enforce this ruling anyway? As for that matter I kind of see it like a TV program. If you don't want to see it don't turn on that channel.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
I just can't get enough of this cool mountain air.
--sdem
We need to be extremely careful moving forward. Challenging such things as DeCSS and DMCA with the term 'open source' leads, just as it did here, to the ideal that the open source community is simply a group of software pirates.
There must be a point made, whether by press release or otherwise, that Open Source does not in anyway support the copyright infringement of any commercially available (or, for that matter, freely available) software. We need to make it clear that we are not advocates of breaking the law, as this judgement seems to suggest.
However, saying that "I am not guilty of copyright infridgement because I work for the open source community" is not a valid arguement. This is probably why it has been associated with piracy. Again, we must make the difference clear to everyone so they don't get the wrong impression.
On a similar note, since the Judges of the court obviously do not understand what Open Source is and labeled "us" as "rogue software pirates", is there any legal action we can take against the court in a defamation of character suit? It's obvious they have just degraded us and our cause without a viable reason.
That sentence is really amazing, since you can copy DVDs without DeCSS, just by byte-copying. You only need DeCSS if you want to view the data on your computer or convert it into some other format.
So it's very obvious that they don't have a clue.
"when it costs you nothing except raw materials which you already have, there's no reason not to do it yourself"
Have you shopped at a lumber yard lately? You can't build it yourself cheaper than IKEA because all their furniture is cheap fiberboard crap that falls apart in a year or two. Great if you need disposable furniture for a college dorm or a bachelor crash pad. Real wood furniture is a much more expensive market segment that IKEA crap.
You do make a good point about taking away tools from do-it-yourselfers. New cars need so many special tools and electronics, and there's a push to lock up PC hardware too. Like Intel's digital display encryption or CPRM for hard drives.
Yeah, lets see them convict him now. That ruling will have an appeal so fast it will make thier head spin.
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god." - Thomas Jefferson
Which caused all your moderations to be cancelled (and you don't get the points back). I guess you never read the FAQs (go down to the 21st one, it's FAQ-U),
Let me get this straight
Didn't the courts just rule that gun makers cannot be sued for illegal use of their products.
But, software developers (all over the world) can be.
These two rules sound conflicting to me. But since hollywood and the gun makes have the money that is the way things go.
I think that this represents serious constitutional difficulties and cannot be seen as within the states rights. Note this is not the DMCA which is a federal law, this is a case of non-Californians being tried under California state law for actions they did not commit in that state. Unlike the Skylarov case, the Constitution has some strong things to say about this case.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
This is about jurisdiction. What the appellate court says about "open source" is largely irrelevant (not completely, as some lawyer will try to quote it, but any competent attorney would slash an argument relying on it to ribbons), if that's not what's being appealed.
When will our rulers^H^H^H^H^H^H government realize that source code is speech.
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
Hrmm.. It seems this judge has a weird view of Open Source in the statment that it has the objective of "making as much material as possible available on the internet".
I'd always thought it was about researching the bounds of computing and helping advance knowledge and understanding.
Now, if your average person accused another average person of this, it seems in the states, they'd jump up and down and scream slander, and defamation of character..
Isn't this just what's going on here, but nobody's pressing this issue?
Malk
looks like someone is bitter.
Since Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson had his hand slapped and judicial relief (by breaking MS in 2) set aside, could this judge also be excused by announcing verdict (illegal Internet activity) before trial?
"... pirating DVDs is illegal, and DeCSS facilitates in the pirating of DVDs."
Jeez, how many times have we heard this bullshit argument? Just because you can use a certain piece of software illegal does not automatically make that software illegal!
Got Freedom?
Thinking?
"Let me get this straight -- you think there's an invisible man in the sky who gives a fuck about what you do?! -G"
Invisible man? No.
Transcendant being who created everything, including me? Yes.
In the sky? No.
Non-material yet omnipresent? Yes.
Who [cares] what I do? Yes.
Kyras, why are you so angry at God?
God loves you and longs for relationship with you. If you want to know more about that, please contact me at tom_cooper at bigfoot dot com.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Most people I know in piracy circles don't even know the meaning of 'open source'. Of course if they did they wouldn't waste their time pirating windows XP - and other crap MS products. They are pirating copies of Office, which they could be using star office for free. They are pirating WindowBlinds, and DesktopX by stardock, both are programs that would have no purpose in the *nix (or *bsd) circles since windows is the closed system. And so on, you get the point.
I loved looking for TV episodes in mpeg format on IRC (now i use an unnammed P2P system) and having people tell me to use this and that FTP server. The servers always had bad performance, if they were up, because they were running on Win9x and not a OS built for that task.
Why would the opensource community need to pirate anything?
Maybe just the 7 lines of code which would let users watch DVD's in their choice of OS because the industry ignored a whole market.
Next, writting a device driver under linux will be deemed reverse engineering and spreading that driver will result in jail time.
[For US citizens only:] What ever happened to "I bought something, it's mine, I can do what I want"? I guess thats a different debate for a different article.
Get your Unix fortune now!
No, it is definately *NOT* the job of the courts to enforce the law. That is the job of the executive branch of government. The job of the courts is to *interpret* the law. And they have a primary duty to interpret it in the context of the constitution, at which they are failing miserably.
Just what did happen to that, anyway?
We're hampered by our own language and the concepts which many of us revel in.
"Free" vs "Libre" is the oldest conceptual problem of open source, and perhaps one of the subtlest tendrils that materialism has in our hearts. Free of cost is a very different thing from free of restraint (although they often coexist.) This is an obvious idea, with observation. But compare careful, rational examination with the deluge of advertisements proclaiming "FREE! FREE!" when what they give is usually the antithesis of freedom. At best it's the freedom of the streetcorner pusher, from whom the first one's free, but after that...
It's quite certain that many "hacker" types enjoy the idea of being on the edge of outlawdom, laughing at laws and dancing over restrictions. Our most popular images are those of the late-night network wanderer, the Gibson-Sterling high-tech low-life, the gleeful anarchist subverting whole structures but by money and influence with small, deliberate acts.
The life of freedom is one we envision, yearn for, and often claim, through these deliberate acts. However, the model of freedom in a society constrained by irrational laws is the outlaw.
When you believe in your heart of hearts that you are a free spirit, don't be surprised when the Man, who lives on restriction, treats you like an outlaw. An out-law- one outside of the laws. Laws are, to their proponents, like a planet's atmosphere. Inside, the only possible conception of life. Outside, the brutal vacuum.
It is possible that the establishments which we rail against are finally listening to our message- which is, simply that the world of information is changing, and with that change our physical world will be transfigured.
Perhaps they've decided they don't like our future.
We haven't proven that the restrictors, the fencebuilders have lost the mandate of heaven. Yet.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Can someone help me copy my DVDs using DeCSS. I've tried and tried, but no matter what I do it doesn't work. #cp /dev/dvd | DeCSS.c | cdrecord -v speed=10 dev=0,0,0 -piratedvd
What is wrong?
Actually, that's not true. Judge Garzon came up with that excuse after the english courts threw away most of the accusations against Pinochet (which were 1800+, ranging from "genocide" to "A cop hit me." [I'm not kidding]). For further illustration, take a look at his process against Argentinian dictators - same thing.
And even if it were international law, you must remember that it wasn't law at the time of the alleged crimes, and law cannot be applied retroactively.
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
Admittedly, [before i get flamed] it is disturbing and unfair that code written with such reasonable and understandable intent gets pushed into the realm of "piracy". However, with the recent plethora of court cases and laws mandating that anything against the corporate interest or without respect for commercial entities attempting to ream the consumer for every cent they are worth, why not throw up your hands and ditch this line in the source:
report bugs and comments to yourname@whatever??
I rest assured that the recent decisions of courts and corporations will actually make it harder for them to keep tabs on what programs are available and how, simply due to the fear they promote. I.e., If I was pavolich, i would rescind to the demands and just release all further code anonymously and underground. In fact, I see that a lot of "controversial" code such as this would probably benefit from anonymity.
if they want to take away your rights and act in an unethical manner, counteract them in the easiest way possible. insist on your rights, and provide the ability to others regardless and via whatever means available.
why don't these coders see it this way? Anyone care to tell me what is holding back these people? It just seems like strange irony. These programmers are to "honest" or maybe "proud" to not put their name on their work. Whereas the company suing them is about as dishonest and non-consumer oriented as possible.
weird.
please enlighten me...
rhad
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
If dude goes to Calfornia to fight the lawsuit, the police there will pick him up immediately a-la Sklyarov. If he doesn't, the judge will automatically find for the plantiff and issue a warrant for his arrest. Talk about an ass-raping coming and going...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
"And since the Court describes Pavlovich's activities as "illegal", it appears to have already decided the main issue of the case itself (which has not yet been tried)."
This is GOOD. In the appeal, attorneys can show that the judge was biased. Shouldn't be hard, given his ignorant comments.
--Fred
Actually, isn't it the job of the executive branch to enforce the laws?
/ Enlightenment2.html
The Legistlative makes laws, executive enforces then , and judicial interprets them.
See here: http://www.guhsd.net/mcdowell/history/notes/unit4
"I wonder if he'd be singing the same tune if China passed a law carrying the death penalty for being an attorney and started coming after him..."
What a service China would be doing the world if they started executing 747s full of American Lawyers!
"Chill, Orrin!"---Trent Lott
At home I have numerous knives, blunt objects, and potentially lethal chemicals that could be used to murder people. From TV I know that I can construct a bomb using the fertilizer I possess (well I might need a bit more). But there is no evidence I will ever engage in these activities and I mostly use my knives for spreading peanut butter and scraping muck off the inside of the microwave. Nonetheless, using the DVD CCA's logic I should be jailed as a potential criminal or at least tied up in expensive court cases for years to come *just in case* ... Maybe I've had violent thoughts or dreams involving the use of knives? (I have but they were the result of watching too many movies "Falling Down" especially spawned a number of these).
;-) Or for that matter just watch the DVD on your sanctioned operating system or industry approved player and make a copy of it using your VCR.
...
...
What the industry fails to see is that what most people want from DeCSS is to be able to view, backup and edit/play with DVD's they *own*. They don't want to redistribute, sell or "pirate" this content. In the case of renting a DVD it would be nice to be able to view it on a platform of my choice. The fact that DeCSS is used in criminal activity has no bearing on these activities. In fact it still appears that no courts have heard any cases dealing with actual criminal "piracy" issues involving DeCSS at all and as the cases go forward it seems more and more obvious they have no understanding of the how concept of "reverse engineering" applies to what they consider "criminal technology".
What the courts need to ask themselves as a "test" perhaps is: "what's so hard about "pirating" DVDs *without* DeCSS?" After all one can just get a DVD burner/copier - sure these are expensive but you can make a lot of money with one
Why do you need DeCSS to do any of this? What does DeCSS have to do with criminal activity? DeCSS is neither sufficient or necessary to engage in criminal "content piracy".
What these kinds of cases and issues do for me is to make me into motivated consumer: motivated to not consume any hollywood produced or distributed media (this is easy - in fact it is **soo** easy to do without that crap and save your money and brain for something useful); and motivated to support *any* alternative. Home made Ogg/Tarkin based media distributed over the net anyone? I'm in
Let us all remember now what Francis Ford Coppola said about film as an art form and the day the "a fat kid in Minnesota makes a movie with a video camera". I will do everything I can to hasten the day when that art form can undo Jack Valenti and his ilk.
Hollywood delenda est
The job of the courts is most certainly not to enforce the laws - we have law enforcement groups for that. The job of the courts is to weigh the evidence and decide if a law has actually been broken.
Additionally, the courts may also decide on the legality of the laws. Congress may pass a law saying I may not spread peanut butter on my head and dance the Cha-Cha on my front lawn, the President may sign it, and the police may enforce it, but the courts decide whether or not it violates my Constitutional rights (which it would almost invariably would). Go buy a book on US Government and look up Separation of Power in the index.
he had a pretty good idea of what DeCSS could do and why other website operators were having it taken down by the MPAA. He knew what he was doing.
[snip]
What do you think he's doing? He's standing up for his Constitutional rights. The DVD-CCA does not have a valid case for the following reasons:
(BTW: You have the lamest sig I've ever seen. What are you? 14? Grow up.)
We want some answers and all that we get
Some kind of shit about a terrorist threat
- Ministry
As a group of rather senior judges, I would sincerely hope that this court has reviewed the case well enough not to make statements such as the one comparing open source to a piracy group. The fact that they indeed HAVE made that statement indicates a misunderstanding that they have no excuse for.
Excusing them by saying that open source is not public is like saying that because most people aren't Amish they should be forced to go to war (and not be exempted, as they actually are). Just because the judges do not initially know about the circumstances, they have a duty to fully understand the case, and not simply let their preconceptions guide them.
That is, after all, the reason for appeals, to avoid one bad court and instead be tried in front of a fair one.
A CD from iTunes: $10 A Song from iTunes: $0.99 Not paying a cent to Microsoft: Priceless
Actually the purpose of the courts is to uphold the constitution - not the laws. That's what gives judges the right to declare laws unconstitutional.
"Chaos, Mr. Who, that is our mode and modus. That is our central kick"
It is not the job of the courts to make the laws (as any first year poli-sci major, or, for that matter, almost anyone who's taken US History will tell you). The job of the courts is to enforce the laws, and under the DMCA, the actions of Mr. Pavlovich were unquestionably illegal.
No, the job of the courts is to interpret the law, and to determine if the laws made are valid. The Executive branch is the section of the US government that enforces the law. The cops (FBI, ATF, Secret Service, whoever), did their job by enforcing the law, and forcing this case to go to trial. The court's job now is to determine whether or not the law was broken, and, should the defense mount an "unconstitutional" argument, determine whether the law is valid in the first place.
This is not surprising at all. Everyone who finds this case interesting should read about the corruption the exists in the 'american' legal system.
http://www.guerrillanews.com/cocakarma/
--
Dmitry will go to prison. The corporate sponsors of the DMCA have already paid for that and they won't accept a refund.
(Joke)
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
There WAS at the time a trial in process against Pinochet (the Communist Party presented the first suit against Pinochet in march 1999, and many others followed; currently the judge that oversees the process has to handle more than 240!), and the judge hadn't finished doing the preliminary work he needed to do.
Now, let's not go off-topic discussing chilean politics, and let's stick to what we already agree on: extraterritorial application of law, at least in the way the Californian court is doing it, is not acceptable.
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
they distributed the magizine (enquirer) in California? The concept I don't see mentioned is the fact that the contents of a web site are PULLED TO your browser, not PUSHED TO your browser. So, for anyone in California to see the information on the web site, they have to request FROM THE WEB SERVER the information. Just a thought...
I live in a small unimportant country: Chile. As you may remember, we had a BIG political problem following Pinochet's arrest in the UK two years ago. One important part of the problem was that Judge Baltasar Garzón wanted to put Pinochet in trial for alleged crimes commited in Chile (not in Spain), using spanish law (not chilean law) in a spanish court (not a chilean one). This implied that anyone could be subject to trial, regardless of the country, and regardless of wether the alleged crime was legal in the country it was commited in. For example: prostitution is legal here (burdels aren't though). Can a local prostitute be subject to trial in the USA (in any of the states where it's illegal) because he/she went on his/her "business" in a street in Santiago last night?
The legal position my country took in that matter (Pinochet must be subject to trial in Chile and only in Chile) was, obviously, completely ignored because it's a weak small country with no power whatsoever. What's interesting to see is this: the judge that carries the process against Pinochet sent last week a... er... subpoena to Henry Kissinger, for his alleged responsibility in events that occurred here in 1973 that are part of the trial. USA's response? A formal letter saying, roughly, "Fsck you".
And now, we see a Californian court doing pretty much the same. How much time will pass before indonesian courts begin targetting US citizens in USA for violating their strict decency laws? Or how much time will pass before a Bahamas court offers quick trials for any crime, for a price (you commit a crime, go there, purchase a trial process where you are declared innocent: when they arrest you later in your country, you'll simply walk away because you've been already tried and declared innocent)?
IANAL.
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
This is what happens when you get the rich, powerful companies feeding misinformation to the public, and to those in power. You've got plenty of people who believe that these companies are just looking out for us, and they wouldnt lie! Put a few of those people in high-ranking positions, and when the DVD people tell them that these hackers/pirates/whatever need to be locked up, the judges believe them.
Now we've got school textbooks being written and published by the logging, oil, chemical, etc industries. My sister's school uses them, and these books are so full of lies it's ridiculous. But, they've got the money and the power, and the ability to form public opinion.
On the bright side of this individual case, IANAL but I'm thinking that since this court ruling essentially declared the guy guilty without a trial, maybe he can use that to his advantage?
-J5K
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
John Marshall seized the power of Judicial Review in the case of Marbury v. Madison.
-Dave
Take these terms and give them to the general populous, including judges, and they are as forign as say chemical names are to non-chemists. Sodium chloride is not something the average person wants to sprinkle on fries... A hacker is not someone the average person wants protecting their private data. They want salt on fries, and a Computer Programmer / Data Security Expert for their data.
We as a community flant with and love the somewhat reckless nature of our subculture, fully knowning where its intentions and morals lie, but the average person does not. Most importantly, no matter how much we want to educate the average person on the nuances of our subculture, they won't learn it. Just like they'll never know what sodium chloride is.
Don't ever expect them to. It's not a failing, it's just reality.
Aaron
AaronCameron.net
I'm not at all surprised that judges think that open source enthusiasts are pirates; Think about the rallying cry, "Information wants to be free!" To the non-technical audience, that means "I don't want to pay for my information!"
Our only hope is to get this kind of stuff into mainstream media with the correct terms applied, so that the public can be educated.
This is basically the substance of Microsoft's appeal to the Supreme Court concerning its monopoly conviction. Perhaps Pavlovich could get some advice from Bill's lawyers?
MjM
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
CANADA!!!!
Actually, I'm actually considering moving there. Now don't get me wrong, I really do like living here in the states. But it's shit like this that really makes me want to move elsewhere. Everything that comes back to the DMCA and copyright laws and other money hoarding devices seem to end badly.
Copyright laws are not without merrit and I know it's not a money hoarding device...for most. I really do respect artists, musicians, etc., but it has gone too far. What is the copyright length now? 75 years after they have died?! WTF? That's like me making a special mark on a piece of paper (lets call it a letter) and then enforcing copyright stuff on it.
"No you may not use that 'a' I wrote on that paper! It's mine by way of copyright! What?! Bull hokey! I take you to court sir!"
(Ok, a weeee bit exaggerated, but it could be done)
*sigh*
Anyway, my best to all those involved in these cases and I hope that someone can step forward and show them that open source != illegal.
</rant>
Actually, that's not correct either. The job of The Supreme Court is to determine the validity of laws. Your average Circuit court just decides whether you've broken a law, without regard to the validity of that law. That's why only the Supreme Court can declare a law unconstitutional, and circuit courts aren't blasting acts of Congress left and right.
You just come along with me and have a good time. The Galaxy's a fun place. You'll need to have this fish in your ear.
The principle of jurisdiction (in this country) is to be sure to afford legal recourse to wronged people. BIGCORP builds a catapault in Indiana, aims it at Joe and Jane in California, and smashes poor Joe and Jane to jelly. Joe's and Jane's poor orphan child Joey can sue BIGCORP in California, but can't get to Indiana. In your world, suit over, BIGCORP gets to cackle at Joey and how powerless California's courts are over BIGCORP. We don't have different laws for different people, do we? Let's not confuse the jurisdiction issue with whether Indiana is a better location than California for the suit. The question that was litigated is whether California is a possible location, irrespective of the rest of the universe. There are law professors that want to do some sliding-scale facts-and-circumstances case-by-case jurisdictional stuff. All of this requires the principle that the courthouse doors are opened or closed depending on who you are. Anyone who thinks that such rules favor LITTLE PEOPLE in the long run are smoking something with quite a bit of kick.
Now the genie is out of the bottle.
Too bad.
That is, honestly, the worst first post I've ever seen.
Maybe I'm an idiot, but precisely how does DeCSS support these illegal acts?
Does DeCSS enable me to copy a DVD? Nope - any bitwise copy program will produce a copy identical to the original. Assuming there isn't some issue with the physical media (e.g., how some CD players can't read CD-R media) that copy can be used anywhere. Pirates don't need DeCSS to produce their bootleg copies.
Does DeCSS enable me to *distribute* a DVD? Of course not - distribution either means taking those bootleg discs to a mail box or a bitwise copy (see above) to a server somewhere on the net. Pirates sure as hell don't need DeCSS to distribute their bootleg copies.
What illegal act does DeCSS enable? Exactly one - circumvention of the "country code" so that a DVD produced for the US market can be viewed in Europe. These codes, it should be noted, were created solely to create artifically limited markets so the studios can make more money.
In contrast, any reasonable analysis must consider the legal uses of this software. Namely, the ability of people to view DVDs they legally purchased in the time/manner/place they prefer. The fact that this is even an issue says just how screwed up the current legal environment is. It's one thing for THX to insist on certain standards for commercial theaters who wish to use their logo, it's another for a studio to insist on the OS and, to a lesser extent, computer hardware of any person who wishes to view a DVD they legally purchased (or rented) from the corner store.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
IANAL and I am also English, but with statements like this, the court has evidenced bias pre-trial and that has GOT to be grounds for a mistrial or at least a damned good appeal.
Tux Games. Your complete source for native Linux games.
This case has nothing to do with the DCMA. If you read the Court's opinion you would know that. If it were a DCMA violation it would show up in federal court as that is a federal law. This is in state court and is dealing with state laws (as any citizen of the US, much less 1st year poli-sci major should know!) In this case it is a violation of California's trade secret laws, NOT copyright laws. Basically the Court is saying that yes, this case can be tried in California (it gives a list of 7 requirements for this and why this decision meets the requirements.)
The disturbing parts of the brief have to do with the Court's confusion over many of the facts of the case and with technology in general, not to mention the clear bias it has towards the defendant, "open source" and reverse engineering. However, I would be very surprised if this ruling is struck down by Caifornia's Supreme Court (not to be confused with the US Supreme Court.)
Looking at quotes of the defendant's testimony, he admitted to an awful lot.
If you are standing in Nevada, and throw a rock and hit someone standing in California, why can't a California court hear it? It seems sense to me. If you could throw the rock from Indiana, that doesn't make any logical difference to me.
Our hero admitted that he knew what he was doing would hurt people in California. He threw the (figurative) rock anyway. Maybe he thought it was legal to throw the rock. It looks like he testified that he even knew (or suspected) it was illegal to throw the rock. Maybe he was right, maybe he was wrong -- he isn't a lawyer after all.
A guy who says he got hit with a rock does not have to prove his whole case to get into the courtroom door. He has to allege that he got hit by a rock, and then prove it at trial, not at the beginning of the case.
I think that the real indignation being voice in this thread is with the ALLEGATIONS. That is, I have not seen one post that said the ONLY complaint the poster had was that the case wasn't decided in Indiana. The decision was the California was a POSSIBLE place to hear the dispute.
Since the defendant lives in Texas now, I really don't see why Indiana would be such a better place apart from the fact that the movie industry is probably strong in California and weak in Indiana. On the other hand, would you rather have this case in front of a Palo Alto jury or a Bloomington jury?
If the whole point is that the defendant didn't do anything wrong, which is the thrust of 90% of the posts -- fine -- prove it up and get the case dismissed.
I'm not sure that this is any worse than Panavision v. Toeppen. I thought that the jurisdictional issue in the Toeppen case was decided wrong, but I can't fault the state court for getting to the result it got to in view of that.
(There are real problems with American personal jurisdiction law, entirely the fault of the Supreme Court in cases that have absolutely nothing to do with Open Source. Volkswagens, The National Enquirer, Burger King restaurants, divorce cases, tag-you-are-it games and etc., etc. The rest of America lives with those problems too.)
> If he had thought things through he might have ...than in Hollywood, and that most computer
> noted that far more movies are made in India
>
> manufacturing occurs in Taiwan or other locations
> in south-east Asia.
Do you know what's the most hideously two-faced thing Hollywood is doing in all this?
The reason movies are centered in Hollywood is because all these suddenly noble, intellectual property rights-protecting Big Studios located themselves in southern California around the turn of the century because they wanted to violate Tom Edison's movie patents, and wanted, literally, to be able to make a run for the border at a moment's notice.
The Big Studios got their start, and built their industry, in Hollywood because of, and by way of, violating someone else's intellectual property!!!.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
I like this. The question is, of course, who's going to do it? Anyone here on /. live in a conservative southern community and have good standing with their local governing bodies?
*crickets chirping*
What?! Is this the wrong forum or something?
Just because a few of us can read write and do a little math, doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the universe
This story was posted last night. My post from that article follows:I would hope that a federal judge would exempt this guy from the case if he were to appeal it. This is clearly an interstate law enforcement issue, which is solely the role of the federal government. What is legal in one state but illegal in another opens you up to completely unreasonable attempts at applying jurisdiction. Making an analogy to the physical world, suppose I pollute the Colorado River in Nevada or Arizona within levels granted by a state permit, but a California permit would be more stringent, and that pollution then enters California territorial waters. The State of California has absolutely no jurisdiction whatsoever, so why do they think they do in this case? Doing so is a violation of the US Constitution.
DVD players could be used as tools in DVD pirating. I guess we should ban them, too.
everyone should have their own little Hague Convention fiefdom.
i just wish california would succeed and be done with it.
As all this talk about using DeCSS (digital crowbar as they wanted to call it in the federal case) could be used to illegally copy DVD so also could a crowbar in the physical world could be used to break into a store to steal movies but i don't see the movie industry running around suing hardware stores or individuals selling crowbars because they *could* be used to steal movies
I've paid for every linux distribution I've bought, LOL..
I think what the Judge is trying to say, is this IP movement threatens their rich friends, LOL!
> Just one more reason to kick California out of the union I say.
Didn't CA's state legislature vote about 10 years ago to pursue splitting into 5 states in the federal government?
Whatever happened to that? I thought the north was sick and tired of a one-way tax flow south?
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Let's personalize it. You've insinuated that I'm smoking something. If I were a prick, I'd call that libelous (actually, if I were a prick, I'd call it slander without knowing the difference) and sue you. Because we're playing by your rules, I get to sue you in the Iowa court system. Hrm...that means (assuming that you don't live near Iowa and that you want to be there to know how the suit's going) that you get to foot the bill not only for the legal expenses you're going to rack up, but also airfare, housing, lost wages, etc...
Check out this site for a plain English review of jurisdictional rules, it's not complete, but it's servicable. The law is supposed to be blind to big guy vs. little guy conflict and the defendent is presumed to be innocent until proved otherwise by the plaintiff/prosecutor.
BTW - In your example, it's unlikely that little Joey would be without a lawyer for very long. Most attorneys would jump at the chance to represent such a client for a percentage of the settlement.
-sk
Note: I've been using the whole rock thing as a metaphor for any actions taken outside a jurisdiction that have an effect within it. A real rock, or Bigcorp's giant catapult assult would constitute a criminal assult and battery. IANAL and I doubt my observations would hold in such a case.
No, the proper place to try them is in Federal court. Investigating crimes across state boundaries is one of the (unfortunately few) things the FBI is supposedly good for.
"There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. " - Sean Connery as King Arthur
I don't know. I think the whole issue here (and in other cases that have been reported by slashdot and a bunch of other places) shouldn't really be this law or that law -- it should be the entire system of law.
I believe the US as a nation has 'lost the game', as far as its legal system is concerned. If one merely takes a step back and looks at the situation, it is evident for what it is: a war of resources. It's like a real battle. Only, instead of planes and missiles, the two sides are launching lawyers at each other.
Now, I will not say 'I am not a lawyer', because half the time (former) lawyers are the ones that pass those abominable laws; the other half they are the same people that can't (or won't) interpret them properly. But what do I see? I see a country that has lost its sense of justice only to replace it with a 'just facade'.
In ancient times, lawgivers were respected people whose reputations preceded them. Entire cultures and city-states appealed to them and practically begged them to order their society. The ones whose names echo throughout history were wise men, that cared nothing for power or rule. And whose sense of justice was unmatched. Ask yourself: Who makes the laws of America today? And who finances them? Easy answer, isn't it?
Another point is that politicians are often the unwitting tools of other people's agendas. Not that politicians themselves aren't good at manipulating people, of course. But their arena is different. They are often clueless where subjects like - say - technology and IT are concerned. In their arrogance, they often don't even bother to research something before publically condeming it and pushing a bill that will further violate people's rights. All for the sake of sensationalism. And all the while, some shadowy person/corporation cackles in the background.
The Law should serve the citizen. Not the other way around. Maybe it's time for the few remaining wise men involved in law-making to look back into antiquity. At Lycurgus of Sparta. At Solon of Athens. Aristotle once said, on Solon's reforms: "Once master of the vote, the people became master of the constitution."
Get out of that maze. Or this will only be the beginning.
Pathway
1930, Germany - You don't have to worry because your not Jewish.
...
1940, the US - You don't have to worry because your not Japanese. 1950, the US - You don't have to worry because your not a Communist.
~1990, China - You don't have to worry because your not a practicioner of Fal Guong (bad spelling, I know)
2000, US - DeCSS, Mitnick, Skylarov, Louima, Rodney King
People, as a large group, suffer from somethign called "diffusion of responsibilitiy" meaning the more people potentially involved, the less likely any specific one will do anything, since "someone else" will take care of it. They also have a tendency to think if someone was arrested they _must_ have done something wrong, otherwise, why would they be arrested, questioned, a suspect, etc. Just look at the Levy chick/Congressman.
For an example that hits home more, think about this... if you have a 17 yr old girl friend and your 18... BAMMO your a pedophile in the news. Pedophilia is when the "kid" is pre-pubescent - under 9-13 generally. Think it doesn't apply to you? Britney Spears was 15 for that first album cover/video. If your were at all attracted to her (maybe turning the volume down first) that makes you a pedophile in the current trial by media atmosphere.
What this attorney is saying, both here and by representing the DVD CCA in this case, is that it's okay for a man who committed a "crime" outside of California to be tried in California, because it's against California's laws.
I wonder if he'd be singing the same tune if China passed a law carrying the death penalty for being an attorney and started coming after him...
Every once in a while I like to masturbate a new word into my vocabulary, even if I don't know what it means.
More people need to know this:
The jury has the right to judge the law.
Quoted from here.
Fully Informed Jury Association's 'Jury Power Page'.
Also, Whitten's _Citizen Rule Book_ has good info on your rights and responsibilites as a juror.
When you sit on a Jury, you have more power than as almost under any other capacity as a citizen, 1000 times more power than when you vote. You have more power than the judge, than the legislators, than the police. You have a right and a duty to judge the facts according to the law, AND TO JUDGE THE LAW ITSELF!
Jury Nullification is when a jury nullifies bad law. A jury can say "not guilty" for ANY reason, especially if the jury thinks the person violated a law, but finds that the law was a bad one.
Research what happened to Edward Bushnell, who sat on the jury of William Penn, accused of practicing an illegal religion.
Also research how Jury Nullification helped eliminate prohibition. (Well, of course I mean *alcohol prohibition*. we still have prohibition today, just a different kind!)
-end quote.
Image what a fully informed jury could do for cases like Pavlovish's, Dmitry's, 2600's, etc, etc.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
The best way to bring about a revolution is to act as if the revolution has already happened. If the concepts are sound, you'll have changed everyone's lives and no one will notice. Most revolutions that happen with fire and smoke are irrelevant.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
"Today the United States of California declared war on Italy. Last week, California sued Italy for defmation, claiming an Italian government official posted a joke on the internet regarding 'Surfers and Marijuana'."
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
If DVD purchasers were _guaranteed_ fair use, then they'd already have the available methods to make their limitted copies or whatever fair use allows _without_ having to 'crack' anything or otherwise violate the DMCA, _or_ the DVD products themselves wouldn't be legal. If the DMCA says you cannot circumvent technical restrictions on copying, then the only fair use you can get is what the DVD providers will allow. Since the products are presumed legal, then my guess is that you are _not_ guaranteed fair use.
My decision based on that analysis is to stay away from the act of mirroring the DeCSS code. As I haven't been arrested, I would guess that my analysis is correct.
I'm surprised at all of you. Do you think we are really free to do whatever we please online? How can you POSSIBLY put decss code to any good use? THE ONLY THING IT CAN BE USED FOR IS TO DECODE DVDS! Though that may sound like a good use to a lot of you, in terms of free crap, GET IT THROUGH YOUR HEAD THAT IT JUST ISN'T GOING TO FLY.
If you break open someone else's software, they will get a little pissed at you. How many of you are actually surprised that the MPAA is getting mad? This subverts their entire effort to protect movies, and No, MOVIES SHOULDN'T BE FREE! And by the way, I don't work for the MPAA or any other organization in any way affiliated with movies.
How can you possibly justify the fight against this? Free software may be good (i'm not an advocate for or against it), but you have to admit that there are some places that you must draw the line! Trying to expand the software available to people...please, this case is so justified. This code will literally destroy the dvd format as soon as dvd recorders are available to everyone. It already messes it up with regular cd's and reduced quality mpeg. If he is lucky, he won't end up owing the mpaa money for the rest of his life.
You seem to think that this is a new case, so the defendant "should have known better." IIRC, this is the original DeCSS case (preceding the 2600 lawsuit). Also, it is not a DMCA case, it is for "stealing trade secrets" as the DVD CCA calls their encryption keys, and it is based on California state law.
This story is not actually about the whole case, it is about jurisdiction. The court is saying that a resident of Indiana can be sued based on California laws. This interpratation of the law is troubling, to say the least...
Having California laws being valid in every other state isn't enough. Afterall, they need to punish the evil haxors in other countries.
Afterall, even huge industries with billions of dollars that can afford to pay crappy actors millions to appear in movies can't afford even ONE evil teenager possibly circumventing region coding so they can watch a DVD they bought here in their own country, where said DVD isn't commercially available.
To think that these villains would even get the idea that they could do whatever they wanted with something they paid money to buy is absurd. How dare they believe that they have any rights whatsover?
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
-sk
Hmmm. There's a word for this kind of statement, and it's ugly:
What do our friends at opensource.org make of this? Doesn't this consititute recklessly negligent defamation? What do you do when the source of this is the courts?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
With statements as stupid as that, their ought to be plenty of rationale for overturning the decision on further appeals. Hopefully they'll keep up with it.
Fight Spammers!
A US studio executive will never be hauled into a foreign court. EVER.
... just ask any Native American. Now that we are the sole superpower Junior (Bush) has us disregarding treaties once again. Clearly the only thing that can keep the US honest when it comes to international agreements and treaties is a balance of power, which was lost with the demise of the Soviet Union.
Perhaps not, even if something as heinous as the The Hague Convention is ever signed and ratified by the US and, say, iran (where many, perhaps most, US movies would be illegal). The US has a bad history when it comes to honoring treaties
But I digress. An important point you are overlooking is that laws vary within the United States. Many hollywood executives could, and perhaps now should, be brought up on charges of violating local obscenity standards with such movies as "Eyes Wide Shut," Showtime's "Queer as Folk," and perhaps even "Faces of Death." Extend the precedents these jackasses are purchasing with our hard-earned consumer dollars to, say, Kentucky, and the legal groundwork is more than sufficient to arrest and extradite a Hollywood Moghul for violating local obscenety laws.
Obviously this sort of thing won't hold up under Federal Appeal, but it would be most amusing to give these pricks a taste of their own medicine, and let them fester in a backwoods Alabama jail for a few years while the DeCSS, and their own, appeals grind through the system.
With any luck both would be overturned at roughly the same time, and if not, then at least the suffering is more fairly distributed.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
"The reach of the Internet is also the reach of the extension of the poster's presence," the ruling stated.
I don't know about you, but when I post something on the Internet, it extends to every state (though may not be viewed in every state). So according to their nonsensical logic, I could be brought to court in any or every state if I posted something illegal (though I don't know what would constitute illegal speech these days...).
when did UID#s hit 500k?!?!
talk about immanitizing the eschaton!
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
Well the view of the CA court may be correct as far as they are concerned. It's possible that the US Supreme court will hold up the ruling, IANAL and won't comment on if the CA courts overstepped their rights as far as state powers are concerned. The grounds of the lawsuit may overstep the first ammendment, and in that case a possible unfavorable result of the lawsuit trial could be overturned by the US supreme court. In fact I would not be surprised if the US supreme court waits to get involved until after this goes to trial in CA.
There is also the posibliity that in another state it would be possible to file a counter suit against the MPAA and company on grounds of the first ammendment, and perhaps slander. Hope is lawyer is on his toes.
My question is this.
California courts are obviously overstepping their bounds. Why haven't these guys gone to Federal Court to get a injunction against the California Courts for a jurisdictional violation?
Secondly, the court did the right thing in declaring his actions illegal. It is not the job of the courts to make the laws (as any first year poli-sci major, or, for that matter, almost anyone who's taken US History will tell you). The job of the courts is to enforce the laws, and under the DMCA, the actions of Mr. Pavlovich were unquestionably illegal.
People, if you really hate the DMCA, you should write your congressional representative. What you shouldn't do is sit around on a weblog complaining about how the courts are crooked when they are really just doing their job. Inaction gets you nothing.
Lastly, as anyone who is familiar with the actions and works of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or Thoreau knows, civil disobedience does not come without a price. If you aren't willing to take the punishment for standing up against unjust laws, then you really shouldn't be breaking the law in the first place. You cannot have your cake and eat it too.
Is your company running tools written by ma
...Microsoft is not based in California, it's based in Washington.
People on the net understand that bad guys 0wn boxes and consider themselves cool. They seem to forget that bad corporations 0wn courts and do far more evil things. There is no remotely possible way an honest judge could have reached the conclusions he/she did
Judicial stupidity like this makes me want to move to Russia, where decryption is legal, unlike some other countries I know...
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
But Pavlovich (and presumably his server) was in Indiana. Web servers don't indiscriminately push content, it has to be requested by a networked computer. Therefore, I wonder if the legal logic would be not that Pavlovich was everywhere at once (and could be sued be via any numerable long-arm statutes) but that he and his server from Indiana were just responding to requests. The requests coming from CA were illegal, thus the client requests were illegal, not the server responses.
Of course, that line of reasoning could be blown out of the water if his server was physically in California. But otherwise it explains away the legal absurdity that by publishing something on the Internet, you are exposed to the laws of all jurisdictions. If this reasoning holds, the chilling effect on Internet speech is incredible.
-sk
than hijacking a well-known censorware website over a stupid conflict of egos? Well, michael, is it?
The movie industry and DVD CCA argued that DeCSS could be used to illegally copy DVDs...
Computers *could* be used to copy DVDs, should we make them illegal too? Ugh.
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
I only post as AC, so that no one ever sees my posts.
Look, I -KNOW- Blake's 7 is popular with the Californian courts, but they don't need to do a re-run of episode 1. Really. And they can take off those fake eye-patches, too.
Seriously, this "attitude" is getting perilously close to defining "Open Source" and "Free Software" as a cult with terrorist leanings. And once you go there, it wouldn't take much to have it outlawed entirely, on national security grounds.
Let's play through this little tale of paranoia, and see where it takes us... Let's say that the movie industry could maintain a de-facto monopoly not, as Microsoft has done, through buying or pushing the competition out, but through declaring competition to be not only illegal, but a threat to American interests.
(If this seems like a big jump, think about what it means to be "a leader of the Open Source Movement", where said movement is about traffiking illegal goods on the Internet. It's not openly said, but what's the difference between this and racketeering?)
The RIAA and MPAA should be applauded for this tactic. They have avoided the pitfall the Microsoft blundered into, by using the legal system itself to crush and destroy any who stand in their way.
But, in California, "Open Source" may be declared an illegal activity, through this action. If the courts decide that it IS solely for traffiking in illegal goods, it looses all Constitutional protections.
Again, let's imagine that this comes to pass. What would be the result?
First, Linus Torvalds would have a price on his head. He and his family would need to evade police and bounty hunters, in his flight to a more civilised State. He might well leave the country altogether.
Richard Stallman wouldn't run. If he lived through the arrest (always difficult, for popular figures, anywhere in the world), he can expect some brutal treatment. The taller the hero, the more vicious the bludgeoning.
Companies openly involved in Open Source would have three choices. Relocate - and fast!, hope that their size makes them unpopular targets, or stand up in opposition. This last option sounds like the sensible one, at first, but when there is a "legitamate target" that anybody can spew all their hate at, entirely legally, I can easily see it rapidly escalating from protests to running battles, to what would amount to a gang war, with California on one side, and the Open Source advocates on the other.
Don't take this attitude lightly. From the UK's "Potential Subversives" to the American's anti-war protestors, confrontations have historically become extremely volatile, with significant body-counts. Until I've seen some reason to believe otherwise, I think I would HAVE to assume that the California situation could become -literally- deadly at any time. To not assume that is to ignore history. And given the choice of being overly-suspicious, or dead, I'll take the overly-suspicious any day.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
OK. The DeCSS cases aren't going well. Anyone surprised by that should stop for a minute and think. What did we expect?
We are aware of a legitimate use for this code: the playing of DVDs under Linux/BSD/etc. That is the reason this issue was originally raised. We all agree that it should be reasonable to expect to be able to play DVDs on whatever OS we choose.
However, just because WE hold that view doesn't mean other people do, and I'm not just talking about the MPAA. Another possible take on this is "Well, those guys choose to work outside the system. They have to accept the consequences of that decision."
Consider! The concept of open source is foreign to most, frightening to those who make their money off of IP. We defy all known economic laws and upset the system. The goals of good software for its own sake and community peer review, as well as creating a tool to do a job and giving it back to the community (think the stone soup senario) are not considered valid by them, and probably not even considered seriously. If they are considered they are probably rejected in favor of identifying us with the scum of the internet, crackers and pirates. Those groups they can understand, and the fact that we do stuff for free and the scum takes stuff for free are easy to get confused.
Many of us feel that code is free speech, and I have seen this idea in some of the transcripts of the various DeCSS court actions. That particular arguement, however valid some of us may find it, is sheer suicide legally. People know technology does amazing stuff; to most people this is sudomagical. The idea of it being speech doesn't make any more sense to most people than calling the blueprints for an F-16 speech. It's a hopeless arguement that will only distance the DeCSS defense from the courts.
Instead, (IANAL, yada yada) try arguing it with analogies they might understand. Point out that selling DVDs which can only be viewed with a CSS license is like selling a book that can only be read with a special set of glasses made by the book seller, where it is illegal to distribute any other brand of glasses without paying the publisher money. Argue that it should be fundamental to let people view a movie that has been properly paid for however they choose. Point out that copying a DVD is trivially possible in any number of ways which do not require DeCSS - the signal can merely be intercepted at the level of monitor input and digitally remastered from there. Point all this out, and then go on the offensive. Call hostile witnesses and ask them point blank under oath questions to show bias, such as "How does the MPAA feel about the act of viewing a legal copy of a DVD under a freely available DVD player?", "If your intent here was to safeguard your DVDs, why didn't you use a stronger encryption?" (That one should be good for about thirty more good quesitons as they try to explain it) "Did you intend this encryption to prevent viewing as well as copying by freely available players?", and finally "Did you deliberately set out to avoid having a legal, freely available DVD player for Linux?"
Start to make them look like the big corporate bully abusing power, rather than making us look further and further outside the mainstream. Don't wave geek principles in their face - they don't care and they don't share those principles. Make clear that the legit need exists, and put the MPAA in the position of deliberately trying to block the meeting of that need. Make them the villian. Because to the courts we look like the villian now.
If all else fails, we need to attack the same way we attack Microsoft - work completely independantly of them. If independant movies can be made using photo-quality computer rendering which rival the quality of professional ones, and done using open source tools, then we can teach Hollywood what Microsoft has been going through - show them what it means to have competition you can't starve out of business and can't kill. I know it's several generations away, and certainly in the case of open source it's a long ways off, but someday it just might happen. Get a few hundred independant creative movie artists, all working for the love of the job on a project, and we might even get an increase in the quality of movies. A dream for us, a nightmare for Hollywood. Right now only a dream. But ten years ago, so was Linux. All things are possible. If they keep throwing the courts at us, one day the may just push us too far. I am of the opinion that Microsoft helped get Linux started with poor products, and nasty business practices. Looks like the MPAA, and the RIAA for that matter, are doing the same thing. We know how to answer them, and when the technology levels and outrage levels reach the right pitch, they'll be wishing they had never said anything at all.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Yes it's unconscienable that the US is sheltering a war criminal like Kissinger.
War is necrophilia.
I cherish the old RMS ethic:
Xerox: You can't copy our printer driver.
RMS: Okay, then I'll write my own printer driver, operating system, editor, and compiler. Who wants to help me?
But now it's just:
RIAA: You can't copy our Britney Spears tunes.
Slashdotters: Yes we can! All your bits are belong to us!
If you people want to protest about the distinction of "free" versus "libre", then knock off all the "free" activity that consists of freeing other people's work without their consent, and engage in some more "libre" activity of developing your own libre software, libre music, libre movies, and so on.
"Q. Is it fair to say that Hollywood, California is the center of the motion picture industry?"
India alone produces about a million movies a year... China, Italy, France, UK, Russia, Japan, Germany, Australia etc. etc. etc.
You can't handle the truth.
:)
- sigs are for wimps.
This case reminds me of the 1994 case US vs. Thomas, where a California couple operated a BBS (called Amatuer Action) whose content was legal within CA, but a DA in Tennessee dialed up from within his jurisdiction, declared that they had violated his local community standards, and had them picked up in California, and transported to Tennessee, where they were convicted of 11 counts of obscenity. They lost their appeal.
Does anyone know what happnned after that?
The real Webmaven is user ID 27463. I don't rate an imposter, because my ID is such a lame-ass high number.
OK, now this is unconstitutional. The U.S. government is the only government that has the right to regulate interstate commerce. This is why you don't get charged sales tax for mail order purchases unless the buyer resides in a state in which you have a nexus (basically, a physical presence). State law simply doesn't apply to interstate commerce otherwise.
I'm pretty confident the supreme court will take this case again. To allow this precedent to be set would be horrible not just for consumers, but for big business as well, as it would pave the way toward taxation of interstate commerce. Write letters to Microsoft and Dell. They will almost surely see the connection and vigorously oppose this ruling.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
I fear that Microsoft will seek to capitalize on this definition of "open" as "piracy" and use it to squash the open source moevement. Oddly, Microsoft has been making recent statements like "we're open" and "Windows is an open system" whatever that's supposed to mean. Likely sophistry. It's sad that the judicial and legislative systems are totally clueless about the issues. Niether lawmakers nor judges are fit to rule over these technical issues and it serves only to benefit monied interests. -- Speaker
Here here!
Not to mention that in Afghanistan, at present, converting from Islam to another religion or convincing another to convert from Islam carries the Death Penalty. All the logical arguments given in the above-mentioned case would trivially apply there as well. Imagine extraterritorial enforcement on *that* one!
Of course, the long arm statute currently has force only within the United States. But globalization's coming, friends, and soon enough we may well have long arm clauses in our FTAAs.
Eventually we're gonna have to ask ourselves, "What kind of future do we want?"
> Are our courts set up to decide what a person
> should or shouldn't know?
Yes. Jury Nullification exists, and the people are well aware of it, say the courts, yet lawyers cannot let the juries in any given case know of its existance because that would wreak havoc on the government, say the courts.
No one ever said, though, that they'd do a good, or even logical, job of it.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
For example, in justifying their decision they cite a National Equirer article written by a guy in Florida. The journalist was sued for libel and the California courts ruled that since he had done 'reseach' [this is National Equirer we are talking about here] by telephone in CA, and National Enquirers were availible in CA he could be sued under CA law.
OTOH, I simply cannot agree that in this case the long arm statue should be applied. Suppose some one in a 50 person town in Montana passes a law making it illegal to link to or serve any form of computer code unless one is a registered corporation. They could then use this precedent to enforce this law on people with webservers in Britain, California, Iowa, wherever. This is an extreme example, but the point remains: The State is much to small to write laws pertaining to the internet. At least with countries one only has to worry about maybe 10 sets of laws.
One thing to keep in mind here is that our legal system was *designed* to discourage change. The internet has only really seen widespread use in the past 5 years or so. The people that are using it are mainly 20-30-40 years of age. In another 15-20 years, when we start getting judges and legislators who grew up with the internet, things may change a great deal. Unfortunately it may be too late by then . . .
Looking at another slashposting of today EU & US Patent "Syncing", I think this is interesting information. If the EU syncs its patent law with the States, the californian terror will also spread to Europe. This will be interesting, because it's very easy to defeat a large company in European courts, by simply starting your own company. If a large company comes down on you with a patent, you smack an antitrust case in their face. Should be very interesting indeed!!!
-- Please put this in your sig if you think
Yeah, and GM gives drunk drivers the ability to publish and distribute death, via vehicles. I don't see anyone suing GM. This is ridiculous. All he did is take something apart and say how it worked. he didn't market it. He just said "Hey world, this is how things work."
I'm disgusted to be an American sometimes. I love the principles we founded the nation on, I hate the whoring the people have done to it since.
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
When on Earth are we going to have judges who understand the fscking issues. How are they going to fairly rule on things that they don't understand ? This goes for any tech. realated issue. Everything from DeCSS to the eBook crap.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
Well, lets see. Here we have California saying thier laws count no matter what state the offender is from. A few days ago we had a /. story about a Canadian
domain dispute being tried in a Virginia courtroom. We have a Russian software programmer
being arrested in the USA for things he did in Russia. Anyone see a common
theme here?
I think the proposed Hague treaty could be just as bad for forcing stupid American legislation on the world as for forcing legislation from backwater countries on us.
But then, there is also a group of researchers being threatened against publishing thier research, hyperlinks and free expresion of source code being declared illegal, and foriegn scientists boycotting events in the US, and major events moving thier venues as a result.
Perhaps the only way the US will be able to prosecute computer profesionals in the near future is extrateritorially, since they will all be working elsewhere.
You are wrong. These are Justices of the California State Court of Appeal. For them the rules are as follows: See California State Appellate Courts Overview
You are thinking of Federal Judges, who are appointed for life.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
These two questions have been rather carefully worded so as to be entirely "yes" or "no" type questions, with no further clarification required. By sticking to that question format, it becomes substantially easier to illustrate a desired point. Any attempts on the answerer's part to elaborate should be immediately addressed with the fact that the question only requires a one-word answer.
1) Is the use of DeCSS the only reliable means through which the normal use of DVD's can be made (that is, given that most DVD movies are distributed encrypted with CSS, does a licensed DVD player need to implement the DeCSS algorithm in either hardware or software in order to fully perform all of the DVD player's functions)?
2) Does the unauthorized use of DeCSS actually enable the copying of DVD's that could not otherwise be copied by someone who really wanted to pirate the movie?
No more questions your honor.
Since the answer to the 2nd question is quite clearly "no", it doesn't even matter that the answer to the first question is "yes", except that it would serve to further make the point clear to a jury. Any person who would answer "yes" for the last question is either ignorant or doing a bad job of lying, since it is fairly simple to prove that DeCSS is _not_ required to make copies of encrypted movies. I doubt they would risk lying, since the punishments for perjury are pretty stiff. And if they ultimately pleaded ignorance in that regard, or claimed that upon being proven wrong that they were simply unaware of the truth, they would likely end up looking like idiots. Although appearing to be idiots isn't a criminal offense, it would probably be a convincing argument that they shouldn't have sole discretion about to whom they license the technology to. If, after all, they are ignorant about the limitations or capabilities of their technology, they may be equally ignorant in their judgement of which organizations they choose to license it to.
Of course, one might be tempted to elaborate on the answer to the last question that DeCSS makes it _easier_ to copy a DVD for the average person who may not have the expertise to copy the DVD without it. This is, admittedly true.. but then having a photocopier at home or at work makes it easier for a person to illegally copy books or magazines too... yet those aren't illegal. Having two VCR's at home makes it easier for a person to illegally copy movies. Having a CD burner makes it easier to pirate CD's. Having a car that is _capable_ of doing over 80mph makes it easier to speed. Having a baseball bat makes it easier to kill someone. Learning how to read makes it easier to find out how to build an atomic bomb, and that in turn makes it easier to actually build one, and that in turn makes it easier to detonate one... and so on... Get the point? Having posession of something that can be used to infringe upon another one's rights or property should not ever be construed as meaning that the possessor of this potential weapon is predisposed towards those ends. Certainly it can be seen that assuming that a person who distributes DeCSS but has never pirated a video is guilty of the crime is tantamount to assuming that a person who purchases a crowbar is going to break into someone's house with it (kind of ironic, really... since they called DeCSS a "digital crowbar", iirc). "But a crowbar has a legal use!" they might say... but as the answer to the first question above illustrates, so does DeCSS. </rant off>
Its Alan Cox for crying out loud!
He practically wrote a third of the linux kernel.
http://saveie6.com/