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Update To Pavlovich DeCSS case; Stay Lifted
MeanMF writes "Update to this article:Infoworld reports that the Justice O'Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court has lifted the temporary stay on the California Supreme Court's ruling that Pavlovich can not be tried in California courts. That ruling can now take effect. More from the EFF."
When reading tidbits like this, it's important to keep in mind that Sandra Day wasn't giving any clues as to the Supreme Court's take on the merits of the case. It looks to me like a purely procedural question, that of personal jurisdiction -- does the California court have the right to drag someone from Texas into Court there. Nothing to do specifically with DeCSS at all.
Still, it's always nice to see things get just a little bit harder for the entertainment industry.
A moment of sanity emerges in the US legal system...more at 10
Who are you! And what did you do with the court system?!? Answer me!!
Hopefully DeCSS will be one more in a series of flops that will lead the media industries to more reasonable, consumer based, less technologically heavy handed solutions. I wonder how much marketing all these court cases from the MPAA and the RIAA could have bought, how much talent could have been found and promoted.
---
When I grow up, I want to be a kid again.
Much better to defend others I guess...
(No, it's not a criticism, just an observation)
"I think its time for this witch hunt to stop. DeCSS is available all over the world. The only people benefiting from this are the trial lawyers being paid tremendous amounts of money by the entertainment companies"
Last.fm - join the social music revolution
Interesting.
The Austrailian court ruled that posting on a website was publication in all viewable locations.
The US court that a website is passive and not directed at any particular audience.
I like the US decision, it makes more sense.
All over a guy that wanted to watch some DVD's he bought...
This whole thing is insane.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I would like to know why O'Connor acted. Perhaps she wanted some research done, or perhaps she floated the case by other Justices without getting a bite. It takes four Justices to grant certiorari and hear the full case.
:)
To label personal jurisdiction a procedural question is misleading. Things like filing dates for briefs are classically procedural. But personal jurisdiction goes to constitutional due process and the very life or death of entire classes of cases. PJ over Web disputes will prove to be as critical issue as the free speech question at the heart of this DMCA case. What good is free speech in the U.S. if you can be charged in some country antagonistic to the concept (Singapore, China, others).
Here, PJ appears decides the case for now. PJ is not a question of the rights of the CA court, but its power, and fundamental fairness to the defendant ("traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice"). If the party has not had or consented to contact with the forum, it is a violation of substantive due process to impose jurisidiction. You don't have to visit the state to get into trouble there. Yet it is important also to consider fairness to the plaintiff, who may have been injured by something really foul done by the defendant -- they're not all as sympathetic as Pavlovich.
Already, the U.S. is already indirectly disagreeing with Australia over this point, a recent Fourth Circuit case. Note the heavy hitters who participated in that appeal --- NYT, WP, DJ, and others. It's not just little website operators who are worried.
The questions can become quite difficult and are the sort of stuff law professors use to torture their students now that thumbscrews are banned. How much "contact" is enough? Is passing over California in the Space Shuttle or ISS enough for them to nail you court? (Don't laugh, I bet this will comes up some day: picture astronaut Francine is on break sitting at his console typing away decryption codes while zipping over dozens of states and countries... for that matter, who has jurisdiction and whose laws apply the first time two pieces of space stuff whack into each other? The first fender bender will be messy.)
Anyway, I'm skeptical whether California got PJ right here -- in an analytical sense that will carry the day for eventual federal standards -- but for all intents it appears the CA aspect of the litigation is dead. Sooner or later, this jurisdictional question will land squarely in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Just thinking out loud...
Should the MPAA not be THANKING the opensource community for making their propritary media work on a system that they wish not to support. It's not DeCSS that makes people not buy as many DVD's, it's the price. While DVD players are slowly becoming better and better and selling for less than $60 at the local Wal-Mart it's just a matter of time before the DVD is standard over a VHS player. But even with falling hardware prices it's still nearly $16 - $25 for a new release DVD. This just seems a bit high for a technology that makes it easier, more efficient, and cheaper way of copying, shipping, and packaging. And yet, VHS tapes are still cheaper than DVD's.
I want this to hit the supreme court and once and for all legalize DeCSS so it can be included with the major distributions. I want to be able to take a DVD play it, rip and re-encode it, and burn it to VCD if I want to. This is simply nothing more than Fair Use and the MPAA is nothing more than a company trying to convolute a situation by confusing people with technicalities.
All VCR's come with a record button, this doesn't even seem odd to anyone who owns one, as a matter of fact a VCR without one would be shunned from the market. Why then does it seem a DVD is so much different than a VHS? Why, there isn't, they are both being used to store a movie that you bought rights to have a copy of when you walked out the store with it (and a receipt). If you want to take it home and watch it you can, if you want to wear it as an earring you can, or if you want to make a copy of it/watch it on your computer in linux, you can't.
Wait a minute here, doesn't this mean that the DVD that I own the rights to have a copy of is protected by some unknown law to me? I thought that copyright law states that if I own me a legally purchased copy of a video I can do what I please with it, so long as I don't resell copies of it, distribute copies of it, or play it to large audiences (I'm sure there's more to that FBI warning, but I really don't want to go read it again).
Does it surprise me that the MPAA is taking the matter to court? No, this is a country where you can sue a fast food chain because you're fat and too dumb to quit eating fast food to make yourself not fat. We're a sue happy society that is accustomed to being in court because that's the american way damn it. Everyone has a right to a fair and impartial trial and we should excercise that right every chance we get, even if that means that someone might actually use a new form of technology to make a shitty copy of a shitty movie and then not go buy an overpriced shitty legal version of their own.
You know what I want to do, I want to sue the MPAA for $16 for every DVD I own that I have seen so many times I know every scene and every word of. Because I purchased a movie for entertainment and that movie is no longer entertaining to me. Yeah, I think I'll call me a lawyer right now.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
...what the Stay that was vacated actually restricted or allowed. Other reports I have read indicate a bit more strongly that the only thing it prevented was posting DeCSS code to his web site.
From this report it sounds more like the Stay was against the California Supream Court's decion that there was no case against Pavlovich as he was not subject to the laws of California.
I seem to recall that this case is a Trade Secrets case, under California Law. As a result if the business or ornanization in question, claiming the trade secret, does not have representation in the states where the various defendents live, or those states do not have equivalent relavent laws protecting trade secrets, I don't think there is any way to take the various people to task for Trade Secret violation.
IANAL, but I would also suspect that if the people in question are not earning money as a result of making avaialable information on CSS, they may not be subject to trade secret violations any way. The understanding of Trade Secrets that I have is that unless you are legally involved with the company holding the trade secret, (via NDA, Employment history, or other direct involvement) the fact that you are publicising what that company considers to be a trade secret is an indication that it is not a secret in any sense of the word.
As an example if Evian takes a truck up to a glacier, fills it with ice, takes the truck back to their plant, and melts the ice down to fill bottles with water to sell, that may very well be a trade secret. If you happen to live on the road they use to go to the glacier and back, and you say "Hey, Evian drives trucks to a glacier and back several times a day." and you don't happen to work for Evian or have other legaly binding agreements with them, you are not disclosing a secret, any one else, including reporters, or even corporate spys could discern the same thing.
In the case of CSS, if the defendents have no participation in the industry, which may include ownership of a dvd player if there is a licence agreement on the outside of the box it came in, then the fact that the DVD-CSS consortium considers what they are publicising to have been secret information is not worth the paper they filed the suit against the defendents with.
Then again, I could be wrong, and the California Laws may be written so that independently comming up with the same method that someone else considers to be a trade secret, very well may be an actionable event.
-Rusty
You never know...
Then it seems the price rose again to over $20 ($22 to $25 for a regular movie and sometimes $30 for a special edition.)
Then it came back down to hang around $20. Was this caused by simple supply and demand or was there another illegal agreement made behind closed doors to keep prices from dropping?