As George Wallace once said, "The country is run by thugs and Federal
Judges." While it is not possible for me to lower my opinion of the
Federal Judiciary after the Jim Bill and Toto festivities, I must admit
that even I am amazed by the size of Judge Kaplan's "grapefruits."
John Young wrote:
> Plaintiffs have invested huge sums over the years in producing
> motion pictures in reliance upon a legal framework that, through
> the law of copyright, has ensured that they will have the exclusive
> right to copy and distribute those motion pictures for economic
> gain. They contend that the advent of new technology should not
> alter this long established structure.
This must be the "give us an injunction because we spent a lot of money on
it" argument.
> Defendants, on the other hand, are adherents of a movement that
> believes that information should be available without charge to
> anyone clever enough to break into the computer systems or data
> storage media in which it is located.
This must be the "defendants belong to a bad movement" argument, again
having little to do with the specifics of the case.
The central point here is that FACTS cannot be copyrighted. If the MPAA
encrypts its DVDs by XORing each byte of data with 0xA5, then it is SPEECH
to communicate that fact to another party, and SPEECH to write code which
reads in a file, XORs all its bytes with 0xA5, and writes out the result.
It is also legitimate encryption research to look at such a DVD, and infer
that XORing with 0xA5 is the algorithm being used.
The most that can be copyrighted in such a case, is a specific piece of
code which someone has written to perform the encryption function. One
cannot be enjoined from discussing the author's encryption clueless with
others, even if one cites specific examples, and one certainly cannot be
enjoined from writing ones own code, printing it on a T-Shirt, posting it
on a web page, linking to it, etc...
The above points do not materially change, simply because the code is more
obtuse than the above example, because the company has spent lots of
money, or because some hackers have other unrelated political beliefs
which the Judge finds personally obnoxious.
What we have here is an attempt to protect "Security by Obscurity" by
legislation, when in fact only idiots make Obscurity the basis for
Security in the first place.
Hopefully the Supreme Court will actually understand the problem, unlike
Judge Kaplan, and issue a ruling that makes sense.
This is yet another example of robed idiots in one jurisdiction thinking
they can enforce "Don't Peek" worldwide.
--
Eric Michael Cordian 0+
O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
