Category Archives: Law: Copyright and DMCA

A venture capital firm called Baystar Capital was crazy enough to invest $50 million in SCO, the people making what appear to the naked eye to be highly preposterous claims about 'owning' unix. (Full details at Groklaw, of course.) If this is a Microsoft-inspired way of keeping a cloud on the legal status of Linux, it's depressing. If the Baystar people actually are wrong enough to think that SCO has a case, that's really depressing — think of all the better uses for $50 million! (And if you want better investments in the internet/tech field, call me — I can point you to a really great investment you can make for one twentieth of that amount.)

There is of course a third logical possibility, however unlikely: Baystar have made a smart bet. Very unlikely, and far too depressing to contemplate.

The Daily Princetonian reports that Threat of lawsuit passes for student, so John Halderman is off the hook. This is thus another case in which a sabre-rattling firm backed down in the face of an outcry. It is still an outrage, however, that these threats can be made even semi-credibly. Sooner or later there will be a case of outrage fatige, or a firm with no common sense at all, and we will have a lawsuit. It will probably lose, but do great damage to the defendant's bank balance and peace of mind in the process.

The DMCA needs to be fixed. Sounds like a job for Howard Dean's new Net Advisory Net?

Did you notice the item about the guy who showed you could bypass a copy protection scheme with trivial effort? Well, the makers of the system are out for blood:

In addition, SunnComm believes that Halderman has violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by disclosing unpublished MediaMax management files placed on a user's computer after user approval is granted. Once the file is found and deleted according to the instructions given in the Princeton grad student's report, the MediaMax copy management system can be bypassed resulting in the copyright protected music being converted or misappropriated for potentially unauthorized and/or illegal use. SunnComm intends to refer this possible felony to authorities having jurisdiction over these matters because: 1. The author admits that he disabled the driver in order to make an unprotected copy of the disc's contents, and 2. SunnComm believes that the author's report was “disseminated in a manner which facilitates infringement” in violation of the DMCA or other applicable law. [emphasis added]

The headline on the press release is SunnComm CEO Says Princeton Report Critical of its MediaMax CD Copy Management Technology Contains Erroneous Assumptions and Conclusions but what they are really concerned about is that he is right, not that he is wrong.

I find the idea that academics might be prosecuted under the DMCA for telling the truth to be hateful and scary.

No socially benefical outcome is prodcued by attempts to suppress the truth. And if Halderman's report wiped some value off SunnComm's stock, well odds are that's an efficient market in action as it didn't deserve to be there.