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ElcomSoft Verdict: Not Guilty
truthsearch writes "From News.com: 'A jury on Tuesday found a Russian software company not guilty of criminal copyright charges for producing a program that can crack anti-piracy protections on electronic books.' HUGE legal win against the DMCA. Thank you Lawrence Lessig."
How much closer does this get us to overturning the law? What exactly did we win?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Read the article. Elcomsoft removed the software and claimed they didn't realize their software was illegal. They prosecution also could not find any illegal ebooks on the web that had been cracked by Elcomsoft's software. This doesn't mean they can start selling the software again. Nor does it mean the DMCA cannot be used in future cases. Essentially they could not provide that Elcomsoft willfully violated copyright, which is necessary in criminal copyright violation cases. This is not a "huge legal win" by any stretch of the word.
First, they had the man arrested. Second, what, did they back down only after massive protest??? Third,
I still won't buy any product or contribute to their profit.
Some things just can't be forgiven. In some republics, we would arrest Adobe, for harrassing an innocent programmer just writing code.
the older decision in "Lawyers vs. Justice" has been overturned! Here's hoping the "Reversal of Freedom Act" will be overturned soon too!
(more Simpsons references)
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
"After much wrangling among attorneys over the definition of the word "willful," the judge told jurors that in order to find the company guilty, they must agree that company representatives knew their actions were illegal and intended to violate the law. Merely offering a product that could violate copyrights was not enough to warrant a conviction, the jury instructions said. "
.this appears to make no logical legal sense to me.
i don't read the word "wilfull" in the DMCA, so i have no idea of how this case could have come out this way.
The DMCA was written to prevent ALL forms of copyright breaking devices (with the well known supposed caveats of research, etc.) This judge's jury instructions seem to fly in the face of the DMCA's whole point... that any device which circumvents copyright protection is illegal.
This judge has effectively rewritten the law from the bench... the law now reads - providing this is what he actually instructed the jury to do..
"Any device which circumvents copyright protections for the use of w4r3z d00dz and pirates (arrgh, me maties) is illegal, but if its not intended to do that and only perform those acts which constitute normal fair use, then it is okay, and you are not criminally liable of any offense."
i'm sorry.. but what the fsck?
(scum sucking hellbound) Lawyers, please help us to understand this...
i'm not arguing with the judge's decision.. i'm questioning his legal position.. please don't get me wrong
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
this always shakes me to my core. It is by far one of the scarier things about our legal system.
Example:
An aguantance of mine ("Tom") is a guidance counselor. Tom would not give a female student a late pass to class, even though she begged because she would get detention. He refused and she stormed off to class. When asked by her teacher why she was late she started crying hysterically. The teacher and her stepped outside and she explained that Tom had made her undress and begged her to have sex with him. He said he wouldn't let her go to class unless she did. (the story is bigger and longer but anyway).
Police are called in, Tom is suspended with pay (go unions) and told to get a lawyer (union said it would cover cost and then backed out).
The girl later confessed to the police that she made the whole thing up and she just didn't want detention and wanted Tom fired.
Get this, her mother said that the whole thing was too shady and that her daughter was too young to decide and she wanted to continue to press charges so that everything could be worked out in court!
Tom has now been asked to please find a job elsewhere (union prevents him from being fired outright), but this has been in the papers, so good luck. He had to sell his house to have money for the lawyer. And when all this is said and done, he will have no way to recover where he once was in life and career.
It makes me very, very ill.
I'm concerned over the fact that the judge's instruction could apparently have so much weight in the outcome.
Could the prosecutors claim the judge was biased and interfered, and demand a retrial?
Regardless of the outcome, a retrial would be a disasterous effect on subsequent juries, since it implies that the original outcome may very well have been faulty. And a lot of people assume may==is.
What's this Submit thingy do?
Almost certainly, except for one problem - if I'm reading the results right, there is nothing indicating that it is LEGAL now to sell the eBook Processor software, and in fact, if Elcomsoft offered it in the US again, they would obviously "willfully" be distributing the software.
Though the judge's instructions to the jury that mere ABILITY to commit copyright infringement is insufficient for a guilty verdict in this case is nice to see, it still doesn't go so far as to explicitly declare in any way (let alone one that sets a precedent) that substantial non-infringing use therefore makes a software product legal, and THAT'S the precedent we really need to get the DMCA under control...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
...it would have been better for the anti-DMCA movement. The constitutionality of the DMCA could have been tested on appeal. This way, the only good to come out of the trial was the statement "Merely offering a product that could violate copyrights was not enough to warrant a conviction". Granted, that's a very good statement to hear in this decision, but the greater question of the DMCA's legitimacy was avoided.
As with any "TOOL" there is the potential for abuse. What the RIAA MPAA want is to take away all the tools to remove that ptotential. If they win then next we will lose the right to bear arms (because somebody might use one to shoot somebody "illegally") and then the right to bear pencils because those can take an eye out. What we need in the USA is to take responsibilty for our own actions and stop being so damn greedy. The companies that comprise the RIAA, MPAA make plenty of money....they just don't like it that Co. B is making more. Until rampant greed is quelled this type of human rights violation will continue.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Yeah, US suit laws (Tort?) are really messed up.
There are people who make a living suing other people. That's ALL THEY DO. They can file a suit for a pittance. Oftentimes, the defendant just settles. If not then the plaintiff goes to court and complains. Winning about half the time.
Bottom line: Win/Lose for the plaintiff and Lose/Lose for the defendant.
I also hear that in Europe, if the plaintiff in a suit loses, they foot the bill. I think it's high time the US adopted such a plan.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
So if a law is bad enough that it will be routinely dismissed in the lower courts, it will never get to the SC, and will never get overturned?? Only borderline bad laws get challenged constitutionally?
Sure, this is law, not logic, so it could well be like this. But I hope not.
Sure he does. It's called libel. In the civil courts he can sue the girl's family, the school district, the teacher the girl cryed to if she ran around telling everyone the story as fact, etc..
Like most of us, I think this is great - especially what the judge was quoted as saying. With that in mind, I wonder how this case might have went if ElcomSoft decided to continue selling the software instead of pulling it off their site when Adobe complained. Would a judge/jury think that ElcomSoft had intended to violate the law just because they continued to sell their product?
Also since the case is over and they are not guilty, can't ElcomSoft put their product back on the market without any legal problems?
Although this isn't anything close to the Supreme Court making a ruling concerning the DMCA's constitutionality, you can bet that this case will be constantly referred to in future DMCA trials.
Giving you a warning usually means they used the probable cause of one minor offense (speeding) to excercise thier arrest powers (detain and verify ID) to look for a bigger crime (warrant for murder, trading MP3s, cracking encryption, you know, capital crimes.)
What it really means in this case is that the prosecuting attorney AND the Grand Jury both decided there was probably cause, but the verdict didn't agree. The legal term for the defendant's situation at that point is "Shit Out Of Luck".
I don't agree. This ruling clearly limits the scope of the DMCA to only people who willfully create software specifically designed to violate copyright and nothing else. At first, this might not mean much, but keep in mind that it's very easy to make any piece of software look like it has non-nefarious purposes. All a programmer needs to do is add a bunch of innocent features to his application, mention only those in the marketing literature, and let people figure out that it can be used to violate copyright.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
That was a criminal case. Unfortunately we tend to believe accusations made (particularly of women against men) without any substantiation.
Even after an accusation turns out to be false some people have trouble coming to grips with that and continue to believe the original accusation. There was a similar case where even after the girl admitted she made the story up people continued to spit on the man in public.
"Merely offering a product that could violate copyrights was not enough to warrant a conviction, "
This quote is taken from the article linked to by the author of the thread. It is from the Judge in the case and refers to an instruction the jury was given regarding conviction. Does this statement seem like it would set precedent for things like maybe...p2p networks? If you apply this statement to napster or kazaa, all of a sudden things seem to change, don't they...
...quicker, easier, more seductive the darkside is...but more powerful, it is not.
I am certain that glasses of champagne are being raised all over the US by manufacturers of DVD and CD-recorders, portable media devices such as IPod and Rio, personal computers, digital video recorders such as Tivo, and any other device that "might" be used to violate someone's copyright. The cartels' position that any slight chance of copyright violation makes these devices criminal under the DMCA has been used to strongarm these companies into accepting intrusive, restrictive DRM schemes that will be highly unpopular with their own customers. Although the tech companies (rightly) suspected that this was only the first step in the cartels' campaign to make the internet and other digital tools so unpalatable for consumers that they would gladly return to the forcefed industry gruel, they had to step to the RIAA/Disney beat or risk a high profile, expensive DMCA trial. Now that the threat of DMCA prosecution for products with an intended legal use has been greatly lessened (if not removed) by the judge's decision, these companies may feel they can shrug off the pressure from the cartels and give their customers the freedom and flexibility they want.
No, no, no. This is not a sig.
Slander/libel are civil torts, not criminal ones. Winning such a suit would therefore not "get her convicted of a felony." At best it would result in an award for damages being granted to the guidance counselor.
Furthermore I'm fairly sure others claiming that all he has to do is prevail in a lawsuit to be set for life are way off the mark. Chances are good that the girl's parents aren't loaded, so it isn't likely that he'll get much more than a six figure settlement, and even that is probably pushing it.
Despite what others are arguing, the true problem in this instance lies with the media, rather than the judicial system. This guy's problem is that he was unfairly tried and found guilty in the court of public opinion, and that is nothing that legal reform would prevent.
While the parents' willingness to litigate is obviously a factor, the media's eagerness to jump on exciting, scandalous news is a bigger part of the problem. They are quite good about tarring potential offenders with the broadest brush they can find, and considerably less ready to come forward and loudly retract and apologize.
But the media only provides content; it is the consumers of such content that are truly to blame for these unfortunate excesses. It is everyone with a small enough mind and mean enough heart that they would judge this man and condemn him, armed only with two minutes' worth of information on the matter.
Not only are you NAL, but apparently you can't be bothered to read the freaking article, which clearly states that "the judge told jurors that in order to find the company guilty, they must agree that company representatives knew their actions were illegal and intended to violate the law." In some cases -- depending on how a law is written -- intent has a LOT to do with guilt.
Uh, like playing them?! Bare in mind that the objective of CSS on DVDs is to prevent use of a player that hasn't paid the cartel's fee; copying a DVD neither needs nor in practice uses DeCSS, it uses bit-for-bit copying machines and programs.
Just like region encoding, CSS was developed for the price-fixing activities of the MPAA cartel, not for fighting piracy, against which is of no value whatsoever.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Currently these people want to appeal the appeal, but can't afford to. http://abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s748537.htm http://abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s748537.htm