At 03:19 PM 02/03/2000 -0800, Phil Karn wrote:
>This is one of the sloppiest and misinformed judicial opinions I've
>read in a long time. ...
I read the hearing transcript and the judge seemed particularly impatient
with the defense attorneys. There was the business about the defense
attorneys not getting any affadavits submitted before the court deadline.
The judge also dinged them a few times because they had trouble navigating
the DMCA. I'm not familiar enough with real legal behavior (as opposed to
TV) to know whether this is typical or not. Either the attorneys weren't
very well prepared or the judge was intentionally giving them a hard time.
It's clear that the judge saw the case as "a large community of legitimate
business people with proprietary interests protected under the law" versus
"a few hackers whose only interest is a game of wits that injure legitimate
proprietary interests" (paraphrases mine).
Someone claimed that motion pictures were not initially deemed to be
protected speech by the courts, and that it took several years for the
technical novelty to wear off. Perhaps we're in for the same ride.
Today, the number of people who read source code is pretty small, and that
makes it hard to convey the concept of expressive source code to
nonspecialists. The defense attorneys didn't seem to understand it and the
judge definitely didn't understand it. Hopefully this is another benefit of
open source: it reinforces the notion that the source code itself is
expressive, since open source serves as a teaching tool as well as
implementing the mechanism itself. So the judicial rulings will probably
come around eventually, tho' I don't want to wait another generation for
the right resolution.
Rick.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
