DeCSS Trade Secret Case Comes to an End - Again 193
Andrew Bunner writes "We asked the courts to rule on our appeal of the DeCSS preliminary injunction (even though the DVD CCA dropped the case) and... we won! No more preliminary injunction. Here's the official ruling (pdf)." This is the last gasp of this case, which we've been following for some years now. This ruling goes into some depth analyzing the trade secret claim, gets the ruling "right", and should be helpful in future cases on similar topics.
wtf? (Score:5, Insightful)
"The court stated that trade secret status should not be deemed destroyed merely because the information was posted on the Internet..."
Holy crap, what exactly *would* destroy trade secret status if posting to the internet doesn't do the job?
does this mean (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:wtf? (Score:5, Insightful)
"The court stated that trade secret status should not be deemed destroyed merely because the information was posted on the Internet..."
Holy crap, what exactly *would* destroy trade secret status if posting to the internet doesn't do the job?
Bringing in a server log or two that show that a few million people downloaded the former trade secret.
Posting to the Internet alone is an attempt at publication. However, if nobody knows it's there, it's not a very damaging one to the secret. So, if only four people downloaded the "secret", those four people could just be told to keep quiet and the trade secret is still in tact.
However, if four million people saw it... oops, secret's out of the bag. At that point, the owners of the former trade secret can go after the source of the leak, but they've lost control of their secret and it now longer gets its protection from further spreading. That secret is now public information, sorry.
Re:But no DVD X Copy. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. That's an apparent contradiction. This is why we have appeals courts. When contradictory rulings start happening at the first-levels, the appeals courts have to sort them out. If the appeals courts can't get their act together, that's what Supreme Courts are for.
Re:But no DVD X Copy. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But no DVD X Copy. (Score:3, Insightful)
The point of DeCSS is single fold, to decrypt commercial DVDs.
Re:But no DVD X Copy. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:slashdot quotes (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes we are watched.
Oh yeah. The analogy?
Buying a DVD is like buying a book locked in a safe, where the seller won't give you the combination unless you pay him additional money.
This is as far as the judge took it in ruling against 2600. My analogy went on to point out that DeCSS was like getting the combination from some other source to open the safe you own to read the book you own. And there's certainly no law against cracking your own safe, or providing instruction to someone on how to do it.
KFG
Re:DVD CCA tried to bail out... but still lost any (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe a statement along the lines of "This information is believed to have been legally obtained by means of reverse engineering." could take away much of the uncertainty in future cases.
Combined with rapid internet wide distribution, this seems a solid way to publish information obtained through reverse engineering in the public domain.
Re:wtf? (Score:3, Insightful)
As if things don't spread from small. Four people that each share it with four people and so on... By the time a court would even look at those four, it's all over the net. But, if they want to keep their reality distortion field...
Kjella
I'm loath to respond (Score:3, Insightful)
Futhermore, those that do make the decision have enough balls to do what's right by (firstly) staying true to their founding idealogies and (secondly) keeping the distribution spottless from a legal standpoint. I for one am glad they've made the hard decisions like these -- and I'm VERY glad that YOU weren't the one making the decisions.
Perhaps you should watch who you accuse of not having balls Coward.
Re:But no DVD X Copy. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why the DMCA is a bad law. You can make legal backups, however you cannot circumnavigate teh copy protection on the DVD. So while you have the rite to make a copy, you do not have legal access to do so. If a DVD is NOT CSS encrypted (and yes, there are some of those out there) then you can just treat the DVD contents like any other data when making a copy. So as long as the DMCA stands, DVD X Copy has no legal use.
This ruling is worth a read (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm also developing an enormous amount of respect for those judges whose opinions manage to be very readable, even when discussing arcane technicalities of law (and, in this case, technology) -- many of us engineers could learn a thing or three from these folks about clear writing.
-Brian
Re:But no DVD X Copy. (Score:3, Insightful)
Never mind that it would also be the perfect place to plug in that DeCSS code that was just ruled not to be a trade secret! :)
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
And just as in the case of a safe, you have even payed for, and thus own, the locking mechanism itself. It is built into your computer's DVD drive.
KFG
Re:But no DVD X Copy. (Score:5, Insightful)
The contents of his videos are protected by copyright law, so although you can use a legally acquired copy however you want, you're right that you can't make more copies without a license.
CSS is an algorithm (and thus uncopyrightable), it isn't patented (if it had been nobody would have had to crack a DVD player's keys or reverse engineer the algorithm to begin with), and now it isn't a trade secret anymore. What exactly do you think he needs a license for?
Re:But no DVD X Copy. (Score:5, Insightful)
Our rights have been trampled here, the innocent have not only been assumed guilty and lumped into a guilty mass, but to add insult the best response by the MPAA is that we should perhaps shell out more dough; and its FUNNY? - RTFL
It is apprehensible that some token jackass with a triple digit income suggests I pay a red cent in order to obtain what I have already purchased...such wisdom is what has limited the amount of dvd's I own to literally a handful.