CA Supreme Court Saves LiViD, Pavlovich 251
joebeone writes "The California Supreme Court has suprisingly ruled that Matthew Pavlovich is not within their jurisdiction in the DVD-CCA's suit against his posting of DeCSS in relation to the development of the LiViD DVD player for open operating systems. What's surprising? It's surprising that they held that his posting of DeCSS was not actionable... (however the use of the program by users to circumvent CSS could be under the DMCA)."
Real Link is Here (Score:4, Informative)
Here it is [pyrorobotics.com]
Re:Not Actionable? (Score:5, Informative)
Par for the course for Slashdot reporting, I guess.
Sorry guys, this means little (Score:5, Informative)
Personal jurisdictional is a constitutional question of due process, and governs whether a court may requires or permit a party to be joined in a legal action. Whether a court has personal jurisdiction is usually gauged by the party's contacts with the state, such as residence, committing significant acts there, consent to jurisdiction, and so on. If the court does not have jurisidiction, the case will be dismissed (at least as to that party) without addressing the merits of the lawsuit.
That's what happened here. The court was quite explicit in its conclusion which questions it was or was not deciding. It is interesting speculation whether this decision is mistaken, and where the plaintiff might next sue, if at all, so as to be assured of personal jurisdiction. It is also possible that the plaintiff dropped the ball and could have persuaded the California court on jurisdiction had it adduced more facts regarding the defendant's actions.
A parting caveat -- I just gave the opinion a power read and could be clueless on something important. However, the nature of the court's discussion is extremely familiar, and doesn't have a thing to do with DeCSS.
Minor correction (Score:4, Informative)
Its an Open Office Export, Nice Troll. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:This is just barely a win -- a technicality (Score:1, Informative)
First of all, why is this in state court? This is in state court because the suit was based on revealing trade secrets in DeCSS. DMCA does not get involved.
So the court has to figure out whether or not it has jurisdiction over someone who doesn't live in California. You can be sued for actions that take place outside California, if certain conditions are met. An obvious one would be if the majority of the harm were taking place in California. Another would be express intent to cause harm or to direct your actions at individuals in California.
So anyways, precedent this, precedent that--what it boils down to is that the plaintiff says Pavlovich is under Californian jurisdiction because he "should have known" that his actions might cause harm to the California film industry. The court finds this incorrect for a number of reasons.
1) Pavlovich wasn't trying to do business, but was merely operating a "passive" website of information for those who wanted it. He could hardly be said to be targeting Californians.
2) The court had no evidence of any particular harm anyone in the film industry had suffered as a direct result of Pavolvich's posting.
3) The court had no evidence that any Californian had even looked at his website (!).
4) The plaintiff organization didn't even exist when Pavlovich's site went up!
5) The court found extremely silly the argument that because the film industry is predominantly based in California, a harm against the film industry is predominantly felt in California, and thus Pavlovich targeted California. There's a funny bit in there about getting sued in Idaho for harming the potato industry.
6) The most important thing, I think, for webheads and sysadmins is that the court ruled that merely posting information does not mean that you had express intent to injure, even if others take that information and use it injuriously. Now, the court was ruling in a very narrow situation, which is that if an unsolicited third party were to come along and injure the plaintiff with DeCSS in California, that would not place Pavlovich under California's jurisdiction.It's not a ruling on whether or not Pavlovich would be liable if he had lived in California. But because of the test the court used to determine jurisdiction, they're also implicitly ruling that posting information is not the same as intending it to be misused (though they're not ruling that you can't be liable).
But, you have to remember certain things. One is that you can't encourage people to use information inappropriately (duh!). You oughtn't use it to solicit business. You oughtn't keep records of who looks at it.
Whether he would or wouldn't have won on the merits of the case is another question. One thing that wasn't clear (to me) from the decision was whether he had the information himself or merely linked to it. Also, was the DMCA even law in October 1999? I can't remember.
Say what? (Score:3, Informative)
This case isn't about Open Source at all. All this ruling said is that CA was the wrong state to sue this defendant.
Re:Microsoft has a Monopoly because of such ruling (Score:5, Informative)
Personally, I think RedHat, Lindows & the others should do this for the people who just want to play their movies without getting into religious debates over licenses.
Hell, $10,000 isn't lunch money if spread between SuSE, Mandrake, Red Hat, UnitedLinux, IBM, etc.
-Charles
but Ogle and FusionSoft DVD lives on? (Score:5, Informative)
For Windows, there's the full-featured FusionsSoft DVD Player which is described as published under the GPL license, but where is the source? The indicated home page [chez.com] of the project is constantly over its monthly bandwidth quota. The last version available seems to be from July, 2002, version 5.0.0.1.
The binaries for FusionSoft DVD Player can be found here [pctip.ch]. Gut again, since it's GPL, the sources should be somewhere. The program itself is multilingual, although you may have to do some german to download it and some french during the installation.
Article Summary is WRONG! DMCA date invalid! (Score:5, Informative)
DMCA does not cover software or hardware created BEFORE the begginning of 2000.
This is a fact.
DMCA will NEVER have any bearing on the original frozen sources of Nov 1999 Livid and livid is now "clean" of any tainting from the XING key anyways.
Current versions use brute force key cracking,a s do other DVD ripping source examples.
DMCA start date was a few months too late.
Too badfor DMCA but its a fact, the origianl aguments were NEVER about DMCA they were about theft of XING key using a debugger violating the click-wrap license.
Decoding the legal fine points (Score:5, Informative)
The lower courts in California agreed. However, the quality of jurisprudence is fortunately a little higher in the California Supreme Court. They kicked it back. Now DVD-CCA will have to start over in another state (probably Texas, or potentially Illinois - where Pavlovich may have done some of the LiViD work while in school).
The case is far from over, in fact, it's just getting started, and it's anybody's guess what will come of it. One hopes one of these will find its way to the USSC while there's still a few shreds of dignity left at that bench; in which case, the DMCA would get the treatment it deserves. But it would depend on many things...
Specifically, with respect to the jurisdiction (which is an interesting, if academic, question), the California supremes held:
The exercise of jurisdiction over a nonresident defendant comports with these Constitutions "if the defendant has such minimum contacts with the state that the assertion of jurisdiction does not violate ' "traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice."
They go on to indicate their position:
According to DVD CCA, California should exercise jurisdiction over Pavlovich because he should have known that third parties may use the misappropriated code to illegally copy movies on DVD's and that licensees of the misappropriated technology resided in California. In other words, DVD CCA is asking this court to exercise jurisdiction over a defendant because he should have known that his conduct may harm--not a California plaintiff--but industries associated with that plaintiff. As a practical matter, such a ruling makes foreseeability of harm the sole basis for jurisdiction in contravention of controlling United States Supreme Court precedent. (See Burger King, supra, 471 U.S. at p. 474.)
Indeed, such a broad interpretation of the effects test would effectively eliminate the purposeful availment requirement in the intentional tort context for select plaintiffs.
[emphasis theirs]
Very simple, actually.
I expect the DVD-CCA's attorneys to get their law on ghetto-style; that means every nasty trick they can think of to rack up costs and price Pavlovich out of the fight. Home-court advantage has a nice synergy, too.
What I find interesting are the series of decisions supporting them which led up to this ruling. Perhaps one of the biggest weaknesses of the legal system is that there is no good way to handle bad judges once they get into the system.
This was really a very close call (Score:3, Informative)
The defendant, Pavlovich, had several things in his favor. The DVD CCA, which brought the suit, claiming that Pavlovich should have known that they would be harmed, didn't even exist when the DeCSS code went up on Pavlovich's web site. The MPAA claims that they sent a 'cease and desist' letter to Pavlovich, but can't find a record of that, so the judges ignored it. And, the CA Supreme court majority recognizes that the DVD CCA could very easily try the case in Texas, so it's no real loss to them to do so.
If any of those three conditions wouldn't have happened, this would likely have been tried in California. It was really really close.
thad
Re:Microsoft has a Monopoly because of such ruling (Score:4, Informative)
Many companies have invested in linux DVD player software development, but few have released publicly or have wide use bases. None are free as there are per unit royalities associated with ac-3 and mpeg-2 decoding (Dolby and MPEGLA collecting, respectively).
So it isn't as simple as RedHat and others dropping some money in a bucket. Companies are afraid of their software getting hacked, losing their shirts due to piracy of the non-free software, running into myriad problems with driver and hardware support which they tolerate in Windows (because of the market and OEM demand), having to deal with frequent kernel version changes (thus potential kernel module issues), and in also having to support their product on a historically "difficult" to use and administer OS.