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Supreme Court to Take Up DeCSS Case
geekee writes "CNET has posted an article claiming the US Supreme Court will take up a 1999 case involving individuals posting DeCSS on web sites based in the US. In November, the California Supreme Court had ruled that Matthew Pavlovitch could not be sued in CA since he's not a CA resident 'with no substantial contact with California'. The injunction placed before the start of the CA trial will remain in effect. The case is essentially about juristiction when attempting to prosecute a number of defendants simultaneously in order to save on legal fees."
i don't think the court has agreed to take the case just yet. it has just maintained the injunction until the court can decide IF it is going to take the case. furthermore, i'm not sure if the decision would in any way make a ruling on the DMCA.
"A response from Pavlovich's attorney, Allon Levy, is due by the end of the day on Thursday. Because O'Connor is the Supreme Court justice responsible for cases arising out of California, she has the ability to place some decisions on hold until the complete court can meet and vote to take the case or deny the petition for review."
smd4985
There is a link from the article to this page. Which has loads of interpretations of DeCSS. Including a Haiku and a screen dump.
How can the capitalist pigs think that this is not free speech or that DeCSS is still a trade secret
Personally as soon as I heard that DeCSS was banned I downloaded a copy just to prove to myself the futility of internet censorship.
better delete it now before the law gets hold of me and confiscated my PC for having sensitive materials
IMHO, any lawyer that brings up DMCA would look like an idiot. It should be noted that only a certain select group of lawyers can be present oral arguments to the Supreme Court. I am not sure what you have to do to become qualified, but I do know that you can't hire just any lawyer.
Remember, this is about the jurisdiction question. It has nothing to do with the case itself, i.e. the SC would not decide whether DeCSS is legal or not.
What this is about is that DVD CCA sued 77 people from two dozen US states and a dozen foreign countries, all in one fell swoop.
As one of the defendents in question, I have to say it's got nothing to do with saving legal fees. We received an e-mail notification of the pending injunction less than 48 hours before it would have been signed. If you live somewhere in europe, have less than two days and the time difference working against you, there is little chance that you can do anything about it. Even had I gotten hold of legal council first thing next morning, my lawyer would have had less than 24 hours to investigate the relevant US laws, find a California lawyer to represent me and write up a defense.
This was not at all about saving legal fees, it was all about steamrolling over as many people as you can manage to squeeze in.
(fortunately, the idiots didn't know CC from BCC, so we got a full list of everyone sued, had all of them put on a mailing list within a few hours and the twits were greeted by EFF lawyers when they tried to get their court signature. The full story is somewhere on my website).
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
DeCSS isn't for copying, because you can copy DVDs without using DeCSS or any decryption. Just copy the pattern on the disc. Commercially available bulk copiers do just that. Hell, the large-scale means of producing DVDs are photographic.
It doesn't take any special qualifications to be admitted to the Bar of the Supreme Court. Get your application here. I've seen these certificates on the walls of many law offices in Washington, D.C. There are about 180,000 lawyers who are members of the Bar of the Supreme Court.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
That is not what the article says.
The court has not yet decided if they are going to hear the case.I feel like picking a fight with everyone who thinks they are right. - Rainmakers
I disagree. The link you provided shows that the copyright law allows consumers to make copies of audio recordings:
And Section 117(a)(2) gives the owner of software the right to make a backup copy.I feel like picking a fight with everyone who thinks they are right. - Rainmakers
So they want permission to able to do a sort of "reverse class-action", where they're allowed to sue everyone at once.
This has nothing to do with getting permission to sue a lot of people at the same time. The law gives a powerful incentive for a plaintiff in a certain matter to sue *everyone* that he thinks might be at fault at the time of the suit, because after the judgment is final, the plaintiff might be barred from suing anyone else wrt the same issues. Collateral estoppel (or, as it's called now, issue preclusion) is principally a judicial economy concept that's been around for quite a while.
The other thing to think about is that there's no fundamental difference between a corporation wanting to sue 500 people and a person wanting to sue 500 corporations (aside from cost and the fact that there are more people than corporations). Both people AND corporations -- litigants -- have had the ability to sue 500 of anything for a very long time. If you think, oh, but a corporation is evil blah blah blah, well, you may be right, but the courts can't and won't assume something like that.
This case is about personal jurisdiction -- whether a court has power over certain litigants to hear and decide issues between them. It's an extremely important case, but it's certainly not about whether one can sue lots of people at once. The problem for the RIAA/MPAA is that because the defendants are all over the world, it's hard to say that the court in Santa Clara County, CA has the power to hale them all in and make final judgments over all of them. If the court rules against them about this issue, then the RIAA/MPAA has to sue the defendants in the courts that actually have power over them. But if, for example, all 500 defendants lived in CA, *there wouldn't be a question at ALL.*