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Federal Judge Rules Against Reverse-engineering
zurab writes "A federal judge in Boston threw out a challenge to the DMCA brought by the ACLU for a Harvard Law School student. Ben Edelman decided to ask court's permission to reverse-engineer the Internet filtering software made by N2H2 in fears of being sued by the company. Of interest is a quote from the ruling: "there is no plausibly protected constitutional interest that Edelman can assert that outweighs N2H2's right to protect its copyrighted material from an invasive and destructive trespass." Full story on Yahoo."
and its so freaking intrusive. it once banned slashdot for "vulgar language" (how often do you see that on /.?
btw, fp!
While the judge's reasoning in this case appears to be wrong, the outcome of the his decision is correct. Part of the anti-circumvention clause states that the Copyright Office was to hold hearings to decide on specific classes of work that should be exempt. They only picked two, which were:
In other words, what the plaintiff wanted to do is not illegal, so he has no standing to challenge the law. You can read about it here. FWIW, that may not be true for long. The Copyright Office is holding another round of hearings, and one of the scheduled topics is whether this exemption should be continued.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Did the submitter read the article?
N2H2 claimed that providing such information to Edelman would compromise trade secrets, and that Edelman had no legal standing to be granted such permission because there was no imminent threat he would be sued.
Maybe they should have picked a more suitable case to file their lawsuit?
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
No. Lists, directory information, and other such data are not copyrightable, nor are they in any other way protected materials. They are public domain by definition.
Check a case, er, I think it is Feist v SW Bell. Feist copied the phone book and published it, SW bell sued, Feist won.
JD
Does merely making a list of otherwise publicly available information make it copyrightable? Does the mere listing make it something new and special?
In short, yes. IIRC, telephone directories are the common example of this.
-jerdenn
Am I the only one who actually read the Judge's VERY CORRECT opinion? The case was being brought under Declaratory Judgement, ie. I am suing N2H2 because they are about to sue me. The Judge ruled that there was not any proof that N2H2 was about to sue, so the case was thrown out. This ruling had nothing to due with the validity of the DMCA or the scope of reverse engineering exception.
Come play Heroes of Might and Magic Mini online.
Sorry... copy and pasted the wrong link.
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Read the court documents here. Edelman asked the court to permit him to a) ignore the license which bars reverse engineering, and b) ignore N2H2's copyright by publishing the web sites he discovered. The judge noted that Edelman hasn't actually done anything yet, and declared that the court is not in the business of handing out a "get out of jail free" card in case he ever does his research, and N2H2 seeks relief.
Wrong (in the US, anyway)
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
Ironically, you picked the one example where it has been established that the collection is not copyrightable.
prizog in a sibling post posted a link to the case that determined that, so I won't bother, but it's worth pointing out that to the best of my knowlege, the phone book, considered as a list of names and phone numbers, is the only thing to ever fail the creativity criterion, so jerdenn's post is otherwise correct.
Also note this does not mean "the phone book" is not under copyright; the part that has advertisements would probably be considered a creative work for the layout, and of course the advertisements themselves are copyrighted. All that was found to not be protected was the residential names and numbers, in alphabetical order.
I don't buy the CIA connection theory, nor would I necessarily consider it to be a bad thing if it were true. It's just the connection with former president Bill Clinton that I find helpful in looking into who Judge Richard Stearns is.
FWIW, for you people with minds in the gutter, my employer's new firewall is configured in a screwy way that was preventing me from posting to Slashdot (apparently this was not intentional; I have a (low-priority) help ticket open to get it fixed). You can see details in my log; apparently there's a Slashdot FAQ about this.
Anyways, the point is, by connecting to Slashdot thru Anonymizer's proxy, I get around my employer's firewall issue. The same logic holds for people behind N2H2's Bess or other similar "blockers".
Part of the Second American Revolution!
C:\> ren dwi2.exe notepad.exe
Get your own free personal location tracker
Of course, to do this his program needs to interoperate with N2H2's software. Hello DMCA exception:
In addition to its main function, the program also happens to identify sites that shouldn't have been blocked.
In fact, this type of thing has already been ruled unconstitutional in New York at least, thanks to the New York Attorney General:
(As a side note, I believe this is the way the First Amendment is stretched to include private contracts: It says "Congress shall pass no law..." but copyright law is also a federal law, and therefore copyright law cannot be construed as prohibiting free speech other than speech with which it is directly concerned, i.e. copying of other people's work.)Female Prison Rape in NY
VBA:)! Add a VBA sciplet to your word document, and then do Shell "." If you email me, i have a dialect program, that edits some key registry enties for running programs and so on. Then you crash explorer (with ctrl+Ald+del) and you have bascially full access.