Author
craig hymson
This is a bit longer than a normal headline and shorter than a news piece. I will upload the clip at the end of the script in a few minutes. It can be read without the script if necessary due to time constraints.
On May first, the first major court challenge to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act was argued before the second circuit of appeals in New York.
Attorneys for Emmanuel Goldstein, editor and publisher of 2600 The Hacker Quarterly, asked the Justices to reverse a lower court ruling, ordering him to remove DECSS, a VD decryption code, from the magazine’s website and ordering him from linking to other sites with the code.
Last year attorneys for the Motion Picture Industry of America, successfully sued Goldstein , claiming that the code will help facilitate the pirating of DVDs.
Goldstein’s legal team includes attorneys from the Electronic Freedom Foundation and the Dean of Stanford Law School, Kathleen Sullivan. Sullivan argued that the lower court’s interpretation of the law, violated Goldstein’s constitutional right to publish truthful information.
She also maintained that restrictions on publishing the code, affects the ability of consumers to use technology that they have already purchased. In the case of DVDs she argued, this includes, skipping commercials, changing colors, using excerpts or watching a DVD on an alternative operating system of the consumers choice such as Linux. All of these are forbidden due to encryption code on many DVDs.
John Gilmore co-founder of the Electronic Freedom Foundation: (audio clip)
“ the fundamental issue here is who is responsible for a criminal act? Is it the person who actually infringes the copyright law? Or is it the person who sold them a tool that they could use to do that or they could use for a lawful purpose. It is exactly what dean Sullivan was saying about crowbars. The movie studios said these guys are selling a crowbar to break into our house. Well carpenters have use for crowbars too and you can’t bust somebody on the street because they are carrying a crowbar until you figure out whether they are committing a crime or not” (30 second clip)
The court is expected to rule on the case this summer.
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