Tag: DMCA
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Discovery vs. Creation
Last week I had yet another DMCA debate, this time at the Chicago International Intellectual Property Conference. Afterward, I had an interesting conversation with Kathy Strandburg of DePaul Law School, about the different mindsets of DMCA supporters and opponents. DMCA supporters seem to think of security technology as reflecting the decisions of its creators, while…
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Miller on DMCA and DVD Reviews
Ernest Miller at LawMeme explains why there is so little fair use in DVD reviews.
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Adobe Files DMCA Challenge
Adobe has filed a federal lawsuit seeking a declaratory judgment that its Acrobat product does not violate the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions. (Here’s Adobe’s press release. I don’t have a link to the court papers yet.) Here is the story, as far as I can tell at this point: Any TrueType-compatible font can be labeled with…
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Apple Uses DMCA Threat Against Competing Product
Declan McCullagh at news.com reports on Apple’s use of a DMCA threat to force a useful product off the market. Apple’s iDVD application allows the user to burn DVDs – but only on Apple-brand drives. A DVD drive vendor called Other World Computing shipped its drives with a “DVD Enabler” program that modified iDVD so…
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Response to Declan's DMCA Piece
Declan McCullagh misses the boat at least twice in his August 19th column concerning the potential impact on computer science research of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act [“Debunking DMCA myths,” c|net News.Com, http://news.com.com/2010-12-950229.html]. First, the DMCA has two arms: one that prohibits devices that circumvent copy protection, and one that prohibits acts of circumvention. The…
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Microsoft Does The Right Thing
Microsoft has decided not to try using the DMCA to censor a paper by former MIT student Andrew “Bunnie” Huang about security mechanisms in Microsoft’s Xbox videogame console. (See this announcment.) Good for Microsoft! If more companies behave like Microsoft did in this case, the DMCA would do less harm. Let’s not forget, though, that…
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Australian DMCA Does Not Prohibit Mod Chips
An Australian judge has ruled that the Australian version of the DMCA does not apply to the sale of “mod chips” for Sony PlayStation game consoles. Technological background: Sony PlayStation is a game console that plugs into the back of a TV. PlayStation games come on a compact disk that is plugged into a CD…
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Edelman, ACLU File Anti-DMCA Suit
Ben Edelman, a soon-to-be law student at Harvard, has filed, with help from the ACLU, a lawsuit challenging restrictions on his right to disassemble and study a Web censorware product from a company called N2H2. The suit challenges the validity of an anti-tinkering clause in N2H2’s license agreement, and of the DMCA provisions that apply…